It Will Just Be Us, page 19
If I keep my ear to the door, I can just hear them.
“Come home with me,” says Don.
“Come home with you?”
“I’m your husband.”
“For how much longer, I wonder?”
“We made vows, didn’t we?”
“Yes,” she says, sounding wistful. “We did.”
They sit in silence for a moment, or perhaps they are continuing the conversation with their eyes. I’ve seen the way Don looks at her—he can put on a gaze with such intensity that I would be uncomfortable to have its sights turned on me, but it is a gaze that must be flattering to Elizabeth, must make her feel special.
“You can’t take care of that baby all by yourself,” he says at last.
“I’m not all by myself,” Elizabeth counters, but her voice no longer sounds quite so sure of itself. Don has a way of making her falter.
“Lizzie.” His voice is earnest, gentle, as he can be, sometimes. “This isn’t the way. You know this isn’t want you want.”
“No,” she says, like the coldness of space. “It isn’t.”
“Our child should grow up in the best environment we can provide him. Do you really think this is it?” Elizabeth makes a noncommittal noise I can’t decipher from my limited perspective. “He’s my son too, you know.”
“I thought you didn’t want him.”
His sigh is heavy, weighted with regret. “Of course I want him. He’s my goddamned son, for Christ’s sake. I just want to do things the right way. And I love you, but you don’t always know what’s best.”
Don’s words echo in my mind, and I think of the other times he has wanted things done the right way: when I organized their books wrong and he knocked them to the floor; when someone at work had an error in their code and he berated them over the phone; when Don himself discovered he had overcooked our chicken breasts for dinner, stabbed his fork into the tough white meat, and pushed the plate away, disgusted. Threw it away, uneaten. What will happen, I wonder, when he decides they are not raising their son in completely the right way?
The next pause is so long that I wonder if they’ve fallen asleep, or engaged in a staring contest, or if time has frozen and I will find they have become statues. I peek around the corner, through the sliver of the open door, and I see a slice of the scene, the two of them sitting there.
“What are you doing?”
I jump and turn around.
My mother is standing behind me with her lips pursed and her eyebrows raised. She looks from me to the door, then finally pushes it open and barges into the room; when we enter, both Don and Liz are staring in our direction, their marble eyes shiny and expectant.
Now with an audience, Elizabeth sits up straighter and looks back at Don. “All right,” she says. “But I’m not coming home. I’m all settled in. You can stay here if you like.” She glances at my mother for confirmation, and Agnes nods.
“Okay,” says Donovan uncertainly, looking around the room at the ornate mantelpiece, the burnt-out fireplace, the moth-eaten sofa, the age-worn curtains, the stained carpet, the anachronistic bronze floor lamps with dusty shades, the antiquity and gloom. He stands and kisses Elizabeth on the forehead.
She allows this and says, “You won’t stay in my room, though.”
“What? You’re giving me the couch?”
“Oh, no need for that. We have plenty of spare rooms,” my mother chimes in.
And that’s how Donovan Hill came to stay with us.
* * *
I have been tasked with changing the bedsheets in the Rose Room, where Don will be staying for the foreseeable future. The other spare bedrooms have sunk so far into disarray that it would take weeks to make them livable again, and while their doors have not been locked, they have been shut up for quite some time—long enough that these rooms have been colonized by spiders and dust mites and who knows what else besides.
The Rose Room, at least, may be made passably comfortable with a bit of sprucing up.
Although I have pulled open the drapes as far as they will go, the room seems impervious to light. Dust hangs heavy in the air, saturated by the cloying pink of the walls and floor. As I yank off the sheets and turn to beat the dust from them, to scatter the gray motes dizzyingly into the air where they will settle again at random, perhaps only to spite Donovan, to provoke some latent allergy, I hear, from just behind me, the wheeze of a consumptive inhale.
The sheet billows back down to the floor when I freeze, listening for the sounds of illness and decay that haunt this room: the death rattle of Frances Wakefield.
Behind me I feel a presence, the feeling when you know someone is watching you, such an intensely revolting feeling that you must turn around and double-check, even when you know you are alone—
I try not to. I take a few steps away from the bed, thinking I will escape this room, but the feeling compels me so, and when I am almost at the door I turn around and see a shape on the bed.
My heart wobbles with the shock of it. Even though I am used to the way this house works, one can never really get used to the sudden appearance of a figure where it hadn’t been only a moment ago.
The shape lies beneath a woven blanket, a relic from the past that doesn’t belong beneath the sheets I just stripped from the bed.
I step closer.
The figure reveals her face: an emaciated death mask with sunken pockets for eyes and chapped, gaping lips. Her lank hair lies plastered to her skin. From between those parted lips she draws a wet, labored breath.
Her glassy eyes, made delirious by disease, stare blankly at the ceiling, in some other realm halfway between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
“Frances?” I murmur.
She coughs convulsively, without even the strength to turn her head, and her eyes roll in their sockets like scattered pool balls. I watch in horror as blood bursts from between her lips, splattering her face and the blanket before sinking back down into her throat. Her breath is a wet gurgle.
One likes to think of death as a peaceful thing, a relief from suffering. A quiet slipping away.
But there is no one here to turn Frances’s head, and no relief from the choking.
Her body fights desperately to draw in air but can only suck blood back into those corrupted lungs, and the sound of her drowning in her own blood is terrible, like sucking the dregs of a milk shake through a straw, and she asphyxiates where she lies, her eyes rolling back in her head as her chest shudders, shudders, and it goes on and on—
Until finally she is still.
Slowly I creep around to her side, the sole mourner at her deathbed.
Oh Frances, I think. But at least she wasn’t entirely alone, at the end. There was someone there to watch her, after all, from across the span of time, even if she didn’t know it.
And yet, now there is a dead body in this bed, and how am I to change the sheets while staring at her too-still flesh, her glassy eyes, her bloodied frozen mouth? I turn to get the fresh sheets, shuddering with the thought of working around her, wishing almost for the haunted sounds of her dying instead, thinking I may as well give up and wait until later, but luckily, when I turn back to the bed, it is just as empty and pristine as I left it, without so much as an indentation to indicate the death of the bedridden woman. Though that faint odor of illness remains in the air, Frances Wakefield is gone.
Tonight, Donovan will sleep where she died.
* * *
And the lone wind blows, wheezing its way inside. It’s a cold night, with frost creeping across the windowpane.
As if it’s any surprise to you, I cannot sleep—insomnia, my persistent companion, keeps me bleary-eyed awake, watching the clock tick its way to dawn. So off I go, to wander through the house in the dark, marking my way through time as I wait for sleep or for morning. Perhaps I will rearrange the furniture several inches to the right.
In the parlor, I find a figure sitting on the sofa. Hulking. A dark shape. I switch on the light.
“Donovan?” Tiny fingers of dread ease away from the pressure in my gut. “What are you doing up?”
He has been sitting in the dark, sitting and staring at nothing, with a strange smile on his face as if he is trying to work out a riddle.
“I heard something,” he says.
That off-putting smile does not leave his face. I feel I must tiptoe, unsure if that smile will crack into something else.
“This house makes noises sometimes,” I say, carefully. These old houses groan and sigh at night, like restless creatures. “It’s an old house. I’m surprised Elizabeth didn’t tell you about it.”
“She never talks about this place.” Then he shakes his head, still smiling without a hint of good humor. “I was trying to sleep, when I heard someone coughing. But there was no one there.” He shakes his head again. “Isn’t that funny?” By the way he says it, he doesn’t think it’s funny. Not at all.
“It’s funny how much Liz doesn’t talk about,” I say, sitting down and rubbing my arms against the chill in the room. “She must not talk much about us, I guess.”
“Oh, no. She talks about you. A lot. Sam this, Sam that.”
“Really?”
“Are you surprised?” He looks at me. “You’re her best friend.”
As I mull this over, a deep shivering cold invades me, and I cannot keep still. Donovan is in a T-shirt but sitting stiffly, uncomfortable.
“Is it cold in here?”
He nods. “Must be a draft coming from somewhere.”
I grab an old throw with unraveling threads to pull around my shoulders as I stand, and we go off through the first level of the house to find where the cold is coming from. It’s a bit like a scavenger hunt—is the door open? No, not that. How about a window? No, windows are shut and latched. Is the heater working? Yes, it is pumping out that stale, dry heat that smells faintly of gas.
“Where in holy hell are we?” Donovan mutters angrily after walking into a chair in the dark. “This place is a goddamned rat’s maze. Who built this house?”
“Mad Catherine,” I reply.
“Mad Catherine?”
“Circa 1800. Catherine’s husband, Arthur Wakefield, had become remarkably prosperous from lumber trade based out of the Great Dismal Swamp, and—” I pause and eyeball him. “You want the whole story?”
Don pulls back a curtain, checking to make sure the windows are shut. “Sure, why not.”
“Well, she begged him to build her a grand mansion. Now, Arthur was more than a little prudent with his wealth, so he bought this marshy land on the edge of the swamp for dirt cheap. It wasn’t the ideal place to build, however, and they had a good deal of trouble framing the house on the soft soil. It took a while to get the building under way, but they did, eventually. Arthur was too stubborn to sell and move elsewhere. Anyway, he was only halfheartedly overseeing the construction, since he was otherwise preoccupied with his booming business. Not much was getting done.”
Don’s yelp interrupts me.
He’s barked his shin on the edge of the coffee table in the drawing room. I turn on the light so we can get our bearings, and when his eyes catch the offending furniture, he delivers a swift kick to its splintered leg, juddering the table across the hardwood floor with a squeal. It slides, stops crooked. I glare at him.
“Can you fix that?”
He blinks around at the room, ignoring me. Oil paintings hang in brass frames around the walls, most of them portraits of unsmiling ancestors. “So which one of these is them?”
“Catherine isn’t in here. They destroyed her portrait after all the trouble.” I slide the coffee table back into place, fix the bunched-up rug it ran into at the corner, and turn for the doorway yawning into the black hall. “Come on. The draft isn’t coming from in here.”
He passes me into the hall, then seems to realize he doesn’t know where he’s going and slows, letting me guide us along.
“Trouble?”
“That came later, after Catherine decided to step up and take charge. Supposedly she was a bit of a taskmaster. She worked the men round the clock. They built and they built, and even when the house was finished, she decided to keep on building. Maybe she liked the power and she didn’t want to relinquish that position and go back to being a housewife, caring for her three small children. She kept coming up with new additions, adding on layers like an onion, and so the construction stretched on for years, the house built piecemeal. That’s why the layout is so confusing. Once you start adding things, the original plans don’t make sense anymore.”
It is getting colder now—an arctic breeze insinuates itself through the coarsely woven throw blanket I wear like a cape.
“Her husband just let her do that?”
“He was preoccupied with work. Or maybe he didn’t care.” I shrug. “Or maybe he did, but she overruled him.”
Don laughs—a mean sound. “Right,” he says. “So what about the trouble, then?”
“Over the course of the construction, which lasted for some eighteen years, three men died,” I tell him.
“Damn,” he says, sounding impressed. “What happened?”
“One was crushed by falling timber, which broke his back but didn’t immediately kill him, because the ground was so soft; instead, it pushed his face into the earth until he suffocated, or drowned, in the wet soil. The next death, however, was what really set Catherine off.”
“Set her off how?” Don asks, and I am pleased by the interest in his voice. It is a story I don’t often get to tell.
“They were adding on the third level, which hadn’t been planned in the original blueprints, and one of the men came down the stairs babbling about how they shouldn’t have built here, that they’d gone too far. It seemed obvious—they already knew this was bad land to build on, being so wet and soft and prone to flooding. But the man insisted there was another reason. He suggested that in all their building, they had hammered a hole through the world. Then, according to the accounts of the other men, he took up his hammer and bashed his own brains in.”
Don looks at me with a measure of amused disbelief. “Gruesome.”
“Yes.”
We wend our way through the darkness, turning and turning until the cold hits with a bitter, shark-tooth bite, and I push open the door to the laundry room. My breath exhales as a faint mist in the moonlight.
Here is the culprit: the tarp I taped over the broken window has blown aside, flapping gently and letting in the outdoors through the gaping, jagged hole in the glass. Winter air frosts the tiny room.
“That’ll be it,” says Don.
“Well done, detective.”
“What happened?” He approaches the window to inspect it. “Didn’t anybody ever tell you not to play ball in the house?”
“My mother and I can get very rowdy.”
He pulls the tarp back over the window and fixes the tape securely in place. “Should hold for now. I’d better measure this window, go get a new pane. Can’t just leave it like this through the winter. Jesus, what would you people do without me?”
I ignore the question. “I’m sure my mother would appreciate that.”
He finishes pressing the tape into place.
Satisfied, I turn to leave, but Don grabs me by the wrist, forcibly keeping me in place. His grip digs into my bones. He is too close; I can smell his stale breath. “You didn’t explain why they destroyed her portrait. Why they called her Mad Catherine.”
I twist my wrist free and hold it to my chest with my other hand. He doesn’t seem at all bothered or contrite. I think if I try to walk away now, he’ll grab me again, harder this time. Don is used to getting what he wants.
“After the man killed himself with the hammer, Catherine became convinced that they had opened something up during the endless construction. She claimed she started seeing the dead man around the house, still working, like he didn’t realize he was dead, and in order to get away from his ghost, she had them continue building in a frenzy, a confusion of rooms and doorways and halls to befuddle his spirit so that he would get lost and go away. No one could reach her at this point, not even Arthur.”
I start to back out of the room, relieved when Don doesn’t reach for me again. He follows me out.
“That’s why you call her Mad Catherine?”
“Well, that,” I continue as we walk back slowly toward the main staircase, “and because, after all that, she claimed the house had taken over its own construction: it started mutating, without the builders lifting a finger. She claimed that doorways would spring up out of nowhere, leading to strange places, and that rooms would grow and shrink on their own. Construction finally petered off, while Mad Catherine roamed the halls of her insane mansion—her life’s work, as it were. There were only a few workers left doing some finishing touches, painting and such, and Mad Catherine had started to blame them for what they had done. In a fit of rage, she grabbed one man’s head and pushed it down into a bucket of paint, and she drowned him in it.”
“Jesus. And she got away with it?”
“Oh no,” I assure him. “She was hanged for it. The Wakefields were quite despised and became reclusive after that, particularly Catherine’s son Everett, who rejected society and turned to Quakerism. It was a famous trial, fraught with drama. You can read about it if you look up the old defunct papers from around here. I don’t believe the town has ever really forgotten.”
Don is frowning, now, as he looks up the staircase with distaste.
Feeling as though I’ve regained the upper hand, I smile. “They say you can still see Mad Catherine wandering the halls at night by the light of a single candle, and that the house rearranges itself in her wake, wherever she walks.”
I have no candle, and the staircase looms above me in the dark. Donovan hesitates at its base, and I hope I have unsettled him. Turning to offer a devious grin over my shoulder, I give my cape throw a theatrical flourish, imagining, for a moment, that I am Mad Catherine, and that the house will mutate behind me as I go up the stairs, that I am in control of this place and that it can do me no harm, for I am its master.
