The Cloisters, page 14
“And because of how much my mother loved this place, we always came here, nowhere else, for the summers.”
While it sounded lonely, I was grateful for the solitude, for the space Rachel had been able to put between us and the city. And there, on the bed, were my bags. And inside them, the card, which had made the long journey from downtown to upstate in less than five hours.
At the floatplane center, I had noticed that Rachel had silenced her phone. When she pulled it out, Patrick’s name had flashed across the top of the screen. And in that moment, I was grateful to have Rachel to stand between us, to have her absorb the growing friction between Patrick and me. The length of the day suddenly hit me, and I couldn’t help but look longingly at the bed—its carefully folded quilts and fluffed down pillows.
“I’m right next door,” Rachel said, reading the exhaustion on my face as if it were her own. And then, after she closed the door, I sat on the bed, looking out into the darkness of Long Lake. The big house, silent save for the creaking wood, contracting as it released the heat of the day.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
For all the time Rachel and I had spent together, we had never been alone, unstructured hours unspooling ahead of us. Every moment had been spent at work on something. We had never gone out to dinner or lunch, as friends do, only grabbed a few cappuccinos, a beer, a stolen sailboat. But all those moments, it turned out, had added up to a friendship. And so, in the kitchen, the next morning, we sat at the counter, drinking our coffees black with our bare feet curled under us.
“In the 1920s the secretary of state used to fly up from Albany for summer weekends. And for a while, my parents lent it to the director of MoMA for the Fourth of July. I think Dorothy Parker may have stayed here once because I found a copy of Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate with her name inscribed inside of it. And in any case, I’ve decided that she was here,” she said, taking a sip of coffee, “for a weekend, or something, and must have left it behind.”
The idea that the house used to be filled with parties and laughter left me with a kind of nostalgia, and I wondered what strange games had been played in the shadow of the Adirondacks. Save for our conversation and the gentle lapping of the lake against the shore that filtered through the windows, the kitchen was quiet. It was easy to imagine what it must have been like with music and people littering the veranda on a cool summer night, music drifting into the hardwoods.
“Have you often brought friends here?” I asked, imagining groups of girls clustered around the counter where we sat, bacon crackling on the stove.
Rachel shook her head. “You’re the first. I haven’t had many girlfriends.”
In that, at least, Rachel and I were the same.
“And Patrick—” It was barely out of my mouth before Rachel stood and walked to the refrigerator, pulling it open.
“Do you want breakfast?” she asked, changing the subject.
“I’m actually not that hungry.”
“Neither am I. Beach?”
I hadn’t seen a beach the night before when we had landed in the darkness, but I was eager to feel the sun on my thighs and a book in my hand. “The beach sounds great.”
And so, together, we changed into swimsuits and carried towels and books and umbrellas, awkwardly wedged under our arms, down to the sliver of sand that curved alongside the lawn of the house. At the end of the lake, puffs of white clouds lolled across the sky. We napped and read and lounged like that until Rachel rolled over and made clear the reality that had been settling into my bones since the dinner at Patrick’s house by asking:
“Has Patrick convinced you about the fortune-telling yet?” She was lying next to me, her head propped on her hand; a bit of sand lingered on her cheek.
I didn’t want to put down my book, the thing that I had been holding between my face and the sun for the better part of an hour, grateful for the distraction. I wasn’t ready to accept what awaited me back at The Cloisters, even what awaited me in my room.
“I want to say no,” I said, letting the implication drift between us.
“My mother once had her fortune told,” Rachel said. “She went to a place on lower Lex where they read her tea leaves. The woman who was doing the reading looked at her leaves and told her she wouldn’t give her the reading. That whatever was in there was too dark and too sad. My mother always said she laughed it off, but I don’t think it ever left her, that fear.”
“I don’t know what will become of my life,” I said, “and I’m the one living it.”
“I think, if it’s real at all, that women would be better at it than men,” said Rachel, looking out across the lake. “And not because women are intrinsically more intuitive—we’re all so obsessed with the idea of a woman’s intuition. No. It’s because women can see new patterns better than men. Think, for example, of textiles. For centuries, women have been weavers. And those women have been able to see patterns and make inferences that create beautiful things. All we’re doing is weaving together a life. Trying to see where the different threads take us.”
I thought of the Moirai, the Greek weaving goddesses who were said to assign our fate at birth. Clotho spun the fabric of our lives, while Lachesis pulled the thread out. Atropos, the cutter, decided when it would end. The three, it was believed, decided a baby’s fate within a few days of its birth.
“Did you know that my parents died here?” said Rachel, not looking away from where the wind was gently pushing the surface of the lake into unfurling crests and valleys.
“No,” I said. But the image of Rachel alone, orphaned, didn’t seem jarring or surprising. There was something about her, a kind of self-sufficiency, occasionally a kind of weariness, that made her revelation make sense.
“I often wonder if that tea reader knew. I tried to find her afterward, but I couldn’t. I had my tea leaves read by dozens of women below Lex. None of them had ever seen my mother. I carried a photo of her to each appointment. And now I don’t carry any photo with me at all.”
“How long ago?” I knew there were no good questions in this situation.
“Three years.”
“I’m so sorry.” It was a deeply inadequate statement. “My father passed away last year.”
Rachel sat up and looked at me.
“So you know,” she said.
I nodded. The clouds hung low in the sky, kissing the tops of the Adirondacks in the distance.
“I think I do believe that people can tell the future,” I said quietly.
“But I don’t know why anyone wants to know how their story ends,” she replied.
* * *
By late afternoon, a thunderstorm had come through Long Lake, wiping away any trace of the heat that had burned the tops of my thighs a rich pink. And in the coolness that spread through the window screens and made me reach for a sweater, I found the desire to be out there, in the bracing summer air, away from everything in the house—Rachel, the card, even myself.
I threw on the pair of running shoes I had brought with me and heard the screen door hinges creak as they closed behind me. From the beach, I had seen it—a narrow trail, maybe nothing more than a game path, that wound its way north, away from the house, which occupied the southernmost edge of the lake. It was overgrown by a network of lacy green leaves and delicate white flowers. Roots gnarled their way onto the path and caught my feet at odd, slippery angles. Everything was wet from the rain, and the stones along the trail glistened with damp, bright green moss. It was, I couldn’t help but notice, a far cry from the trails I had grown up using, trails that were open and dry and grassy, full of big vistas that allowed you to chart your progress using a few distinct landmarks.
Here, there were no landmarks, just a continually knotted thicket of hardwoods and a canopy so dense that I quickly lost any ability to see the sky. And in time, the trail moved away from the shore of the lake and deeper into the forest, where the terrain shifted back and forth from mostly dry and passable to water-logged and boggy. Still, I continued on. Feeling in my aloneness and the steady movement of my body the distance I needed from the day, the summer even.
There was no denying the position I had put myself in by concealing the card from Patrick; the risks to my job and my future were enormous. And yet, I wasn’t sure if the choice had been mine to make. In that moment at Ketch’s, I had felt as if I were possessed by something outside my rational self, as if instinct had overwhelmed logic. It was, I realized, as another group of roots tugged at my feet, a feeling that I had only ever felt once before. During a day when everything seemed automatic, instinctual—the day I had come home from campus to find the phone in the kitchen ringing and ringing and ringing, my mother never having set up the answering machine, until finally, I answered it, and heard the words on the other end. I’m so sorry to tell you this, but Johnathan Stilwell is dead.
Nothing else from that day ever came through, just the feeling of acting on instinct, of being unable to distinguish between what had really happened and the dreamlike reality I had entered. I could remember the clunk of my car as I shifted it into park, the faint ring of the phone audible even from outside, the feeling of the phone in my hand. But there was nothing else besides the inevitability of it all.
This time, the hardwoods that flanked the path reached out and tripped me, and I found myself, knees scuffed, palms muddy, face-to-face with the damp soil and hard shale that made up the trail. I wasn’t sure, at that point, how long I had been walking. Long enough to realize I was no longer certain of my surroundings, nor even of the route the path had taken to get me there. Under the canopy, it was impossible to tell how quickly the sky had darkened, or if it had done so at all.
I picked myself up and brushed the twigs and dirt from my hands and knees, and decided it was time to retrace my steps back toward the house. As I walked, I thought about the card sitting in my bag, about the strange inscription—trixcaccia—that had been painted across its front. If the word looked unfamiliar, the language did not, at least not entirely. And I searched my memory—that thin, imperfect archive—for where I might have seen it before. But while I worked on this, it was becoming clear that the temperature was dropping and that the light was waning. I should have, by then, reached the shores of the lake, but all I saw was the same tangle of hardwoods, the same undulating stone and loamy soil, the same ponding water where the sound of beavers, their tails hitting the surface in warning, echoed through the forest.
I had never been afraid of the wilderness, at least not in the West, where I could overland, where I could see my destination. But here, the forest was so thick I could only see twenty feet in any direction. The hardwoods were like a hall of mirrors, always receding into sameness. I stopped moving and took a moment to listen, hoping to hear the roar of a boat motor or the occasional rush of a highway, but the only sound was the water dripping from the leaves of the trees, a steady and maddening break to the silence. In front of me, the trail continued; I had not noticed it branch or loop back, and so, I kept moving, waiting to see the stretch of lawn in front of the house, the boathouse, the lake, anything.
Before long, it grew dark. Dark enough for me to be sure that it was not simply the shadow of a passing storm, but nighttime, with its concomitant coldness, working its way through the tree trunks. And although my eyes had adjusted some, I still found myself tripping every few steps and reaching out to catch myself, on a rock, a shrub, anything that might help keep my balance. But the cold and the darkness weren’t the worst of it. The worst of it were the shadows, the deeper blacks that darted along the edges of my vision like apparitions, so quickly, I couldn’t be sure if they were real. And with them came the fear. Not just the fear of the night and the cold and whatever else might be in the forest with me but the fear of my decisions—to hide the card, to leave Washington behind with its open, grassy rangeland, to agree to come to The Cloisters at all. And then, the fear that none of it had been mine to decide in the first place.
I paused and realized that in the darkness I had lost the trail. There was no way I could continue on until the morning, until the sun came back and allowed me to get my bearings. Out of options, I sat on the damp ground, my knees pressed against my chest, my back against the flaking bark of a tree, and waited until the dampness seeped into my bones, and my teeth began, every few minutes, to uncontrollably chatter. There was no space, then, to worry about anything other than keeping warm enough to make it through the night.
I still don’t know how long it took her to find me, but by the time she did, I was so cold I couldn’t work my jaw open to call out. It didn’t matter. She had brought a jacket and a flashlight, and she saw me immediately, my white shoes now caked with mud and splashes of green.
“Oh my god, Ann.” When she reached me, Rachel wrapped the jacket around my shoulders and slipped an arm around my waist. “Can you stand?”
It turned out I could, if unsteadily. The jacket was helping, but it was Rachel’s body heat, which came off her as she worked to help walk me back toward the path, that warmed me the most. Within a few minutes, I was able to take more confident steps, so long as she stayed by my side.
“It’s okay,” she said as we followed the trail of her flashlight. “This is the way. You can trust me.”
Even when I felt better—warm enough, well enough—to walk on my own, I didn’t want to let go of her. As if she, herself, were a ghost who might disappear if our bodies ceased to touch. But then, after about thirty minutes maybe, I could see it—the lights of the house, the trim on the veranda. And most importantly of all, the difference between what was real—our bodies, the card, the house—and what wasn’t: my memory of the shadows from that night, maybe even my memories from nights before.
* * *
“I need to show you something,” I said. I was running a towel over my hair, and had spent what felt like an hour in the shower scrubbing the dirt and grit out of my hands and knees.
Rachel was sitting on the bed in my room, having started a fire in the fireplace while I was in the bathroom. It was well past midnight, and the only noise in the house came from the popping of sap as it was licked by the flames.
If I could pinpoint the moment that my loyalty to Rachel became stronger than my loyalty to Patrick, it was then, that night. The moment when I decided I needed her to confirm what I had already begun to work out in the forest. From my bag, I produced the card and its old fake front. I set them down on the bed next to her where the word on the card, trixcaccia, stood out. It seemed, in so many ways, to be nonsense. A collection of consonants and vowels, but already I could see the way the suffix had been turned into a prefix, the word cut up and reassembled. It was a code. One I had already seen. I returned to my bag and felt around until I found the folder that contained the transcription from Lingraf, the passage neither my father nor I had been able to decipher, and set it down next to the cards.
Rachel didn’t say anything, picking up the card and turning it over to look at the back before turning her attention to me. “These were what Patrick was picking up the other day?”
I couldn’t miss the accusation, the implication in her question—that he hadn’t told her what we were picking up at Ketch’s, and then again, that this might be why he had been so angry.
“Not exactly,” I said. I placed the old false front on top of the card. “All the cards Patrick picked up looked like this. While they were in the upstairs room, I was looking at this card, the Popess, and just flexed it in my hand. I knew I shouldn’t, because it could crack the paint, but the stiffness had always, like you said, felt wrong. Like it was manufactured. When I did, the top corner of the card came loose. I could see something else underneath but didn’t want to damage it. So I separated it with my fingernail. It was held together with flour and water, and this is what was revealed.” I removed the false front as I spoke.
“Diana,” said Rachel, looking down at the card. “The huntress.”
I nodded.
“And the others?”
“I didn’t have a chance to get to them.”
Rachel kept her eyes focused on the card, as if she were committing it to memory.
“Does he know?” she asked, finally looking up to meet my gaze.
“No. Only you.”
“Good. If he hasn’t figured it out by now—” She shook her head. “It only took you minutes of feeling the card to notice. How could he have them for this long and still not know?”
“Do you think he already knows one of the cards from Stephen is missing?”
Rachel shrugged. “He told me Stephen was working on getting him a complete deck. And that Stephen had located a few loose cards that matched the descriptions of the deck he had sold to us. They would be coming in over the next few days. So I don’t know if this is all of them, or if there are more still coming. When I went in to talk to him on Friday and let him know we were leaving, it didn’t sound like Stephen on the phone. At least not that I could tell.”
I was grateful, then, that Patrick had passed off the receipt to me. He had no record of what Stephen had sold him, although, no doubt, Stephen would know. Stephen with his ledgers and his records.
“The huntress,” Rachel said again, this time more softly. “Diana Venatrix.”
I looked down at the card, Rachel’s words echoing in my ears. Venatrix was Latin for huntress, while cacciatrice was the Italian word. I had always, when looking at the transcription written out by my advisor, thought I could see bits of Latin here or there. But translations without a key were impossible. The card, I realized, was that key—an image of Diana as the huntress, and the word, spelled out in the same strange way, was something we could use.
I reached into my bag and pulled out a notepad, on which I wrote the word on the card: trixcaccia. And then the Latin, venatrix, and the Italian, cacciatrice. There, in the word on the card, I could see the way the Latin suffix, the ending of the word—trix—had been combined with the prefix of the Italian—caccia. In order to translate Lingraf’s transcription, all I needed was to watch for standard Italian and Latin prefixes and suffixes.
