It Will Just Be Us, page 21
A hot coffee sounds so pleasant and lovely on a chill day such as today, but I cannot bring myself to stop at the diner in town, where I know Don will be sitting hunched over his laptop in the corner booth, a strange out-of-place fixture, an uprooted artifact.
In the study of archaeology, context is what gives artifacts meaning. No matter the site, every artifact found has a relationship to the situation, the time period, and to the other artifacts nearby. That is why each artifact must be properly documented before it can be removed. Once an artifact is removed from its precise location without prior documentation, it has been removed from its context, and it no longer has any identifiable scientific value; its meaning is lost forever. Without context, you have objects with no clear relationship to one another or to the situation, and without those relationships, you have no patterns—just random chaos.
This house is an archaeological nightmare: people and objects and sounds appearing and disappearing at whim, with no rhyme or reason, with no intelligible context unless one has already studied deeply the history of the site. And it isn’t as if the memories can be precisely documented either, as I have discovered with Nathaniel’s camera. I can keep notes in my journal, which I have been doing for many years, as you know, but even those notes must be biased by my own hand. All I can do is try to identify and document the context, to desperately try to make sense of the patterns and form them into a coherent narrative. I am, if anything, a pattern seeker, and where no pattern clearly exists, I will try to find one, or form one, or make one up.
As an archaeologist, I am trying to make sense of the context in which Donovan appears in this tale. I consider ghosts and memories of the house’s inhabitants to be artifacts just as much as anything else, requiring documentation, so I suppose I have come to consider human beings artifacts in their own right. And as you know, artifacts require context.
What is the location in which he has appeared? What is his relationship to that location, and to the other artifacts (or people) present? Your assignment will be to write a report in which you find the pattern, and then explain the meaning of that pattern.
* * *
In the evening, we find Don tearing apart the Rose Room. Elizabeth and I were paging idly through books—by some unspoken agreement we have been spending more time in the same room as each other lately—when we heard the racket going on up here, so we threw each other a look before hurrying to Don’s room.
Pillows and blankets have been dashed to the floor in a frenzy as he rips open the floral curtains, yanks them shut again where they dance and sway before falling still, pulls open empty drawers, grunts, and leaves them hanging there like gaping, hungry mouths.
Elizabeth folds her arms and raises her eyebrows at the scene of destruction. “Looking for something?”
Don whirls around like a feral cat startled by human presence, his body taut and lithe and ready to pounce. “What are you playing at?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
His arms rise and fall to encompass the room. “There’s someone coughing in here!” His eyes dart from me to Elizabeth, daring us to reveal our secrets.
A sad uncertainty comes over Elizabeth; her stance is no longer wry and charming but worried, defeated. “If you’re going to go around tearing up my mother’s house, maybe you shouldn’t be here.”
He steps closer, towering over her. He shaved yesterday, I believe, but stubble is again growing over his cheeks, roughening his hard-eyed face. “Shouldn’t be here?”
I think this is the moment—in the slump of her shoulders and the way she picks at her cuticles—when I realize that Elizabeth has begun to regret her decision to admit Donovan into the house. It is not like it was when it was just the three of us; having him here is like inviting in an unpredictable stranger. At least that is how it feels to me; it must be so much different for Elizabeth, since this is the man she has lived with for years, her partner. And yet she shies away from him as he passes us out into the hallway, shies away from his touch as if afraid he will turn those ravaging hands tearing up the room onto her and tear her up, too.
* * *
As we straightened up the room after Donovan destroyed it, I found a curious artifact—a letter wedged deep in the bottommost crevices of a little-used drawer, yellowed and curled at the edges. I am surprised the paper has lasted this long, but a mother’s love, I suppose, can last an eternity. I will add this to my records.
To my dearest,
Forgive me, my son, for you will not see me again. Yet I know you will do well without me. You have your whole life ahead, and all the world is open to you. You are going to have opportunities I could never have imagined, and I am so glad for this even though it brings me pain. I know your father will look after you well, for he loves you, and you are nearly a man, ready to look after your own self. While I do not believe any child ever truly stops needing his mother, you will do better without me. I know it. We can only live a half-life, each of us, in our present circumstances. I can never truly be your mother; you can never fully be free of where you come from. But once I am gone, you will be. You will be able to be a white man, and I do not know any greater freedom than that.
Now I am returning to the one place that I have ever felt free, the one place that I feel I can call home, as strange as that may seem, for I only lived there a few short weeks when I was a child. In some ways all my experiences there seem like a dream, and at the same time, feel more real to me than anything else in this life. Yet do not despair, my son: this way, we will both be free.
Even though I am not there, I will always be with you. Think of your dear mother, but only in the quiet spaces, when you are alone and away from the burdens of who you must be, from now on, and how you must present yourself to the world. Think of me when your heart is sore and the world seems cruel. And think of me when your heart is full, too—for I will be there with you in your joy. And even though you must never tell a soul who your mother is, remember always who you truly are, at those times when you are able to be exactly your own wonderful, beautiful self.
With love great enough to fill an ocean,
M.
I carefully fold the old, yellowed paper and take it with me. Whatever became of Meriday? What happened to her when she went back to the swamp? Did she find her own mother?
I slip the letter between the pages of the notebook in which I’ve written down all my notes about Meriday, Jonah, Clementine, and the Wakefields of that time. Another artifact to add to the puzzle—the last one, perhaps. The end of their story, even if it ends in a question mark.
Poor Lucius, I think. For, despite all his good fortune and the depth of his mother’s love, he still had to grow up with August Wakefield for a father.
* * *
Winter in Virginia is never what you expect it will be.
Up in the Blue Ridge and Appalachian mountains, you could be freezing to death in a snowed-in cabin, but closer to the coast, the ocean keeps our winters typically mild, save a nor’easter or two. Things get quiet in winter, as if the blanket of snow has muffled all living beings; the insects hush, and the lonely wind blows through dead trees. Winter is a time for the quiet—for aloof wind and soft flakes and the low crackle of flames in the fireplace, and the quiet shadows they cast on the walls, shadows that cavort silently behind you.
In our childhood winter days, Elizabeth used to bury me in snow the way you’d bury someone in sand at the beach, packing it up to my neck until I couldn’t move. Once, she left me there for half an hour, and when I came inside my lips were blue and my mother scorched my throat with hot tea.
In a winter like this one, even the primordial swamp crystallizes with the cold. But in all my life, to tell the truth, I can’t remember a winter quite like this one.
Already the snow whirling outside is climbing up the windows. Campus has been closed due to the blizzard, classes canceled; and I am marooned here in the house, with nowhere to go, with the rest of the world slowly dissolving beyond the white and the white and the endless white building up around the house. Campus is a distant blur. Shadydale is erased. Even the roads are gone, buried, and the cars in the driveway, so encrusted with tumorous growths of ice, will not budge. Don goes out again and again to take a hammer to the sheet of ice that has grown over his windshield, and I wince with each blow, thinking he will crack straight through the glass. A bucket of hot water melts the worst of it, but the tires will need to be dug out; they are glued to the frozen gravel. We are trapped in a house filled with ghosts.
Little Liz and little Sam scamper through the house, appearing and disappearing as ephemerally as steam from a teakettle. In the library, I look for a book to read and find instead my mother sitting in that old blue armchair with a half-empty bottle of wine—no, it isn’t now-Agnes but another Agnes, and she cannot see me, though I do not think she can see anything, as she stares blankly into the distance. Perhaps she can see my father hanging himself again and again, somewhere deep in her mind. And then I find her, again, this time in her reading room, with a watered-down highball, and I can smell the memory of bourbon as she shuffles her cards methodically. And I find her, again, in the dining room, snapping at little Liz to go to bed, to put Sam to bed, and it is midnight on the mantel as she goes to pour herself another. And I find her, again, sitting beside the cold ashes of the vacant fireplace, sipping on a glass of red. I pause to contemplate this memory, all these sad memories, wondering if the house is trying to tell me something, if only I could decipher its code.
At last, my mother looks up at me and says, “Are you just going to stand there and stare?”
“Oh,” I say with a jolt. “I thought you were …”
She does not ask me to finish. Instead, she holds up the bottle of wine at her feet, and I nod and go to find myself a glass, thinking that when I return I should really tell her to get a fire going, for the room is gloomy and chill without it on this darkening afternoon.
When I step into the hallway, though, I hear the ghostly echo of someone calling my sister’s name from somewhere else in the house. His voice rings out hollowly and dies away as I turn the corner, nearly running into Elizabeth herself.
She hisses at me as I open my mouth and pulls me into the next room, standing near the door to listen.
“What are you doing?”
“Don’s looking for me,” she replies, still peering out into the hallway.
I frown. “Should I tell him where you are?”
“No,” she says. “Why would you do that?”
Don’s voice echoes emptily down the hallway, closer now.
I look around; we are in the den. I grab a chair for her to sit down, and she gratefully lowers herself. She sucks in a sharp breath, but before I can even ask, she waves me away and says, “It’s nothing.”
“If you don’t want Don here, why don’t you just tell him to go?”
His voice reverberates down the hallway, and I look questioningly at her.
Elizabeth stretches out her legs and leans back, trying to get comfortable. “For one, none of us are going anywhere—he still hasn’t managed to get the car out.”
Before she can get to her second point, a shadow falls over the room as Donovan steps into the doorway.
“There you are!”
Elizabeth smiles weakly. “Here I am.”
“I’ve been looking all over for you.” He takes a heavy step toward us, the floorboards groaning beneath his weight, and Elizabeth cringes. He stops. “Why are you avoiding me?”
“I’m not avoiding you,” she says. “It’s just a big house.”
Don looks at me, and I cross my arms. The ghost of a cigarette burn haunts my palm, even though it’s healed and doesn’t actually hurt. He turns back to Liz and speaks as if I am not in the room at all.
“You know, when you told me your weird sister was going to stay with us a while, I didn’t say one word about it. I made her feel right at home. I went out of my way to be nice to her. And now I’m here, and you’re all acting like I’m some uninvited guest.”
I realize he’s holding a tool in his hand, a metal crowbar it looks like, and I wonder where he got it, and I wonder what he will do with it.
“You know, where I’m from, we have a little something called hospitality.” He fiddles with the crowbar, and I see Elizabeth’s eyes dart toward it. “A little something called gratitude.” He throws the crowbar down by Elizabeth’s feet, where it clatters and rings metallically. “I just wanted to tell you that you put together that crib all wrong. All wrong. I’ve taken it apart. I’ll have to fix it.” As he turns to leave, he looks back over his shoulder and spits out, “You’re welcome.”
Elizabeth and I share a look. Her lips are pressed together; her face is white and shiny. I want to tell her I will help her get rid of Don. I want to tell her I will protect her. But these sound like such silly things to say, so I don’t say anything at all.
I make a mental note not to go near the nursery, if Don is in there destroying the crib I built. I won’t go near the Rose Room anymore, either. The rooms I am avoiding are starting to add up. I wonder if he has seen any children in the nursery, running around, playing.
A few months ago, before Elizabeth showed up in the rain, when the house was still quiet with only Agnes and me tiptoeing around it, I saw little Liz and little Sam playing house in the nursery; the same room that so frightened my father when he woke up that night years ago to find, in his eternal silence, a baby crying in a mysterious crib. We never spent much time in there as kids, but it must have seemed the right spot to play house that day, with muted sunlight streaming in through the window onto the tacky yellow wallpaper.
Little Liz and little Sam were playing house. The elder wore a ratty old apron several sizes too large for her, and carried a rolling pin she’d found in the kitchen. She was the mother. She was nine.
Little Sam didn’t have any props but the picture book she carried in with her, and she was made to sit on the floor. She was the baby. She was seven.
When Liz noticed the book, she said, “Babies don’t read,” and took it away.
“Hey!”
“Babies don’t talk, either.”
Playing along, Sam simulated a baby crying and reached out for the book, which Elizabeth held just out of her grasp.
“You can have it when you’re older.”
“When will that be?”
“Quiet, Sam! You’re a baby!”
Sam crawled around on the floor while Liz pretended to cook in an imaginary kitchen, moving the rolling pin back and forth over the air and humming to herself. “The cookies are almost done,” she said. “Do you want some cookies, Sam?”
Sam nodded, for she could not speak. She was only a baby.
Liz handed her the imaginary cookies. “I’m going to be the best mom ever.” She was too young to notice the irony of the statement as she pretended to give cookies to a pretend infant, but I notice it when I watch the scene, and it makes me laugh.
Breaking her role, Sam pouted, “But Mom is the best mom ever.”
The look Liz gave her little sister was too old, too wise, a look noticed only when revisiting the memory many years later, when you start to see someone for who they really are and not who you perceive them to be. “Eat your cookie, Sam.”
Sam pretended to eat her cookie, looking a little disappointed that it wasn’t a real cookie, but not complaining, at least, because it was easier to play her role than it was to set off Lizzie’s temper, and it would be better for everyone if she just acquiesced so that Lizzie would like her and want her around.
And that’s when the crying started.
At first, Liz and Sam were delighted by the disembodied echo of a baby crying, because it was the nursery and they were playing house and why shouldn’t there be some realistic sound effects? Elizabeth clapped her hands and looked around, but it was only the sound of it, no baby to be seen. For a time they danced around the room looking for the baby, calling come out, come out, little baby, but nothing happened, and the crying rose to a wail, and an adult watching this scene might start to wonder what baby they were hearing, what time period it was coming from, who would neglect the child so completely as to leave it crying, crying, crying.
Sam put her hands over her ears and rocked back and forth and began to cry. “Make it stop,” she begged her sister, still believing that because Liz was two years older, she had some sort of power over these situations that Sam did not yet possess.
Lizzie did not seem as bothered, and as she watched Sam’s discomfort, she giggled.
When Sam had had enough, she got up off the floor to leave the room, but Liz slammed the door shut on her, blocking her way.
“I want to go,” said Sam. “Let me out!”
Liz pushed her back, telling her, “You can’t leave. We’re not done playing yet.”
To block out the awful, incessant wailing of the invisible baby, little Sam slapped her hands over her ears, hating the sound, hating how loud it was, the way it crawled under her skin. But little Liz grabbed her thin, fragile wrists and pulled her hands away from her ears, forcing her to listen.
“You’re a bad mother!” Sam shrieked, trying to wriggle free from her older sister’s grasp.
Frowning, Liz let go; Sam, still squirming, toppled onto her side on the floor.
“I’m going to be a good mother,” Liz said, her voice so low that Sam could hardly hear it over the crying. “Now sit down and eat your cookies, Sam.”
Tears snaking down her cheeks, Sam crossed her legs and dutifully pretended to eat imaginary cookies while the baby’s wails echoed around them.
I shudder when I revisit the memory, hearing the ghost of the crying baby in my mind, and I wonder what sort of parent has left this child alone—and I wonder whether the child will grow up and remember, in a subconscious part of the brain, this neglect.
