The Den

by Abi Maxwell

  I was always certain it was both, and I was certain—though I never said as much—that it was a good thing, what had happened to that family, because if it hadn’t then we never would have even known about them, and we certainly wouldn’t be able to hear them calling out at night more than a century later.

  * * *

  —

  By the summer of Kaus, we had more or less outgrown our father’s storytelling, but despite all else we at least continued to have family dinner together nearly every night. It was at one of these meals that, just as my father reached with the tongs for a second ear of corn, we heard what we at first thought was a dog’s bark, but then transformed into a long, clear howl. When that howl ended another began, and soon it was as though we were surrounded right there in our own house. We hadn’t heard those animals for so long, and I believe we had all assumed that they no longer existed on our land. Now, as the calls went on, our father remarked that the coyotes must have returned to The Den, and, like old times, he began to tell the story. He didn’t spare one single detail, and he even added names for the Scottish family, which he had never done before: Thomas and Elspeth Ross, Colin, Evan, and Jeremiah. Hearing them felt like a revelation, like those people had suddenly come to life. I looked to my sister. She had gone white. Which I suppose could have been from all the vomiting, but actually, I don’t think it had that sort of negative effect on her, at least not yet. In fact, during that period, despite her thinness, I remember Henrietta as a more sanguine being than ever before. My father concluded his story by repeating that the coyotes had returned, and as he said it I realized just where my suddenly colorless sister must have been hiding with Kaus.

  * * *

  —

  The truth is I never did figure out exactly why she turned so white, though; my sister was not afraid of those animals. She was not afraid of the wilderness, not any part of it. So had it been a fear that she would be caught? That with the story our father was teasing her? But if so, why then did she promptly return to The Den? Because I was right, of course. The very next day I stalked through the woods, and when I heard their voices I skittered to the small, rounded gully that lay just east of the foundation. Our father had said that gully had once been the village’s dumping pit. There were rusted metal drums and large springs down there, and even a ruined antique car. I had spent many childhood hours sitting near that car, imagining its story. Now, though, with Henrietta and Kaus in The Den, I stayed at the top edge of the gully and peered out. I could see them clearly. Though I didn’t quite believe that my sister would go so far as to have sex, I did half expect to find her doing just that. Yet what I witnessed was the dreamy if adolescent sort of conversation I came to equate with real, true love: Do you believe in fate? Love at first sight? Is your mood always determined by the weather? Is your personality determined from birth? I listened, and lingered in that foundation long after they had left, believing, for the moment, that all three of us were involved in a gentle and thrilling affair.

  Yet of course no such calm, dreamy fate was possible. It was that Saturday night that I woke to the creak of the stairs, which I had done many times that summer, as my obsession with my sister had heightened my senses and lightened my sleep. This time, though, the creak was not imagined. I sat up and listened as my sister very clearly tiptoed her way down. At least to my knowledge, she had never gone out at night before, so I could not help myself. I followed the moment I heard the door close. She went to the barn. (Because it was more comfortable there? Because she believed there would be coyotes in The Den at night?) She slid the northern door open and entered, and then she slid the door shut, though not quite all the way. Our barn had separate lofts over the east and west wings. There was only one staircase, which led to the western loft, and to get to the eastern loft you had to crawl on a ladder that lay across the open space, some ten or so feet above the barn floor. No one ever went to that side of the barn, and all that was stored up there were useless doors and windows left over, so far as I knew, from the people who had lived in the house a century ago. The moon was full, and because she’d neglected to close the door all the way, I could see her clearly. She went up those stairs, crawled across the ladder, and threw a heap of blankets down. When, eventually, she returned to the ground floor, she unfolded the blankets. Candles, matches, and cigarettes were hidden within.

  When I heard footsteps on the grass I knew it would be Kaus. I skittered to the far side of the door, but there is no way that I was out of sight. He had to have seen me. And yet he was undeterred.

  I don’t know whether or not that was my sister’s first time. I’m fairly certain it was. Kaus walked in and she bent over lightly to pick up a wool afghan. She shook it outward, and the blanket caught air and fell like a parachute to the ground. She lay the second blanket atop the first. Kaus went to the far edge of this makeshift bed, and she crossed over to him. Nothing clumsy about these movements, either. It was all performed seamlessly as a dance. Henrietta began, with his shirt. She balanced on her tiptoes to pull the T-shirt over his head, and then she moved on to his jeans. The crack of the zipper split through the night. Kaus, all this time, stood absolutely still. Oddly, all the animals of the barn were still, too. But once he was naked a horse let out a long sigh, and Henrietta pointed to the floor. He moved to lie down, and then, slowly, she removed her own clothes. Once naked, she simply stood there, skinny, pale, her small breasts cradled in the light of the moon that poured in through the wedge between the sliding door and the wall. In time the light seemed to ease her down atop him.

  I should have been shocked, maybe even disgusted, because this was sex and I was only twelve. But those two—my sister, in particular—looked so sure, so unafraid, that I was simply stunned, and left with nothing but the blaze of the act itself.

  * * *

  —

  The very next morning, my sister rose much earlier than usual. It was a Sunday, which my father had off, and when Henrietta arrived in the kitchen he announced that he wanted to do something as a family. Our mother refused.

  “Charley,” she said. “Charley, you know I am deep into this painting.”

  My father, in response, said that he would just take his girls. But Henrietta also refused his offer, and retreated back to her room. Torn between the opportunity to observe my sister after her night in the barn and the gift of having a day alone with my father, I just sat there, unmoving. But to my surprise, my father abandoned me. He said he would go fish alone, and left the house within minutes.

  I went upstairs. Henrietta’s door was locked, and she wouldn’t respond to my knocks and calls. I assumed she was sleeping again, but an hour later she arrived through the front door, leaving me baffled, yet I had no chance to ask questions, for suddenly, at long last, Henrietta came to me with her troubles. It was the breakthrough I had waited all summer for. Apparently Kaus wasn’t home—she had been to his house. Also not at the trestle, and not in the woods. None of their usual meeting spots. She told me all this, then grabbed my arm and dragged me into the living room, where she said, “Be quiet, we’re watching a movie.” The movie, as always, was the one video we owned—the story of a boy and girl who get abandoned by shipwreck and eventually come of age alone together on a deserted island. There’s one scene that Henrietta, in the past, would rewind and replay over and over again. In it, the boy and girl make love for the first time. It happens in the water, in a tropic, pristine pool beneath a waterfall. Slowly, as they make love, the pool fills with blood. To us, it was a dirty, gripping, and delicious scene, but that day Henrietta turned the TV off the moment the scene began. She slammed down the remote, picked up the phone and dialed, then slammed the phone back down without talking, and then repeated this action two more times before she said, “I’m going to kill him. The slut. I am going to fucking kill him.”

  This went on for a few days, and though she was losing her mind, I have to admit that these days wer
e my happiest. She was suffering but she was mine, I had her back. Or at least a version of her. She had begun to scheme, her eyes alight with a sickening pleasure. “I could tie him up,” she said, so focused. “Push him off the trestle and make him drown. I could trick him, he’s so desperate. Get him all tied up like I’m really going to give it to him, and then I could just push him off. He’d float away,” she said dreamily, “and be gone.”

  “I could shoot him,” she said. “Dad has an old hunting gun somewhere. I could just shoot him. But that would be way too much to clean up.”

  Soon, though, her ideas for murdering her lover transformed into simple plans to ruin him. At first I thought this was a positive development. And then I realized that these new visions of ruin could actually take place.

  “No one will believe him,” she would say. “He’s a liar who sells drugs, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Drugs?” I ventured.

  “Just weed. God, Jane.”

  So it was that we began to keep a list of misdeeds we could commit and blame him for. We could break the school windows, or even our own; we could spray-paint a stranger’s car; we could steal our parents’ money or liquor. Nothing too terrible, though she did once suggest harming herself, which gave me a scare. She said I could strangle her just enough to leave bruises on her neck, or I could whip her back. When she was too tired, I wrote the ideas down for her. She kept the list folded up in her jewelry box, beneath the spinning ballerina that rose when the lid lifted, and she told me I could get it and add to it any time I wanted.

  “Even if it’s the middle of the night. If you have a good idea, don’t waste it, Jane.”

  This—my sister rallied alongside me—was heaven. And then there was a phone call. Kaus, of course. Just like that, she was gone from me again.

  * * *

  —

  This time was different, though. Previously, my parents had scarcely taken notice of Henrietta’s whereabouts. Now, within a week of her reunion with Kaus, fights among my mother, father, and sister began. I was told to stay in my room, and for the first time in my life my parents kept watch to make sure I wasn’t spying from the top of the stairs. During these fights my mother took on a loud, biting voice I had never known her to own. I could hear her through the heating vent in my bedroom, though I couldn’t make out the words. All I know for sure is that early one morning the fights were through and my mother and Henrietta were gone. They stayed away overnight, and when, the following afternoon, they pulled back in, my mother got out of the old truck and walked around to the passenger side. I had gone out to the driveway by now, but I knew to keep my distance. I could see that Henrietta was slumped against the truck door. Our thin mother opened that door slowly, and like a rag doll my sister fell lifeless into her arms. She got situated with her feet on the ground, though, and with their arms wrapped over each other’s shoulders they walked to the house and up the stairs. The night before, I had watched as my father changed the sheets on my sister’s bed—something we girls had done ourselves for ages. Now I understood why he had. Henrietta was eased into those crisp sheets, and there she stayed for almost a week. Rather than painting, my mother brought soup, water, damp washcloths, and medicine to Henrietta. She sat with her on the bed and quietly ran a hand through her daughter’s oily hair.

  Surely, I thought, surely such wreckage would signal the end of Kaus. Surely, once she stood back up, my pale sister would be mine once more.

  * * *

  —

  “Sylvia,” our father said not two weeks later, as we all sat together at the dinner table once again. “Sylvia, I’m not about to chain the horses up.”

  We were eating a bland spaghetti I had prepared. It was because of a novel I had read at the very start of summer, a happy little mystery set in Italy. It had been filled with thick tomatoes, rich cheese, and long, melting pasta, and I had been transported, and when the book was through I’d announced that I wanted to cook. My father had taken a list and bought supplies for me to prepare dinner once a week, and the routine had stuck, and so had the recipe, which, on this night, had come out poorly. So there we sat, eating our tasteless meal, made even more dismal with the mood, and all of us aware that our father had already lost the battle—that always, our father lost the battle with our mother.

  “One night only,” she said.

  Our father asked how she herself would like to be chained up for one night only.

  The problem—as our parents understood it—was that somehow, after countless years, the horses had suddenly become smarter and figured out how to free themselves from the barn. In the past they had freed themselves from their stalls, but they had never escaped entirely. Now our father told us that Mr. Cutler had called to complain three times in one week, saying politely that Shania and Dolly were ruining his gardens, and today he had literally nailed a note to our front door. Our mother read it aloud to all of us: Though I aim to be eternally pleasant, I am afraid that if those damn horses eat one more rose I will be forced to do something very, very unpleasant.

  Perhaps it was the strangeness of the note, its uncertain tone, that kept our parents from focusing on a problem that surely they could have otherwise figured out. And why didn’t I help them along? Just a few hours ago I had been to the barn, where I had rifled through the lovers’ supplies, believing—wrongly, I realized at the dinner table—that they were through. I had opened the blankets and touched the candles and had even found their cigarettes. Now, I could have screamed to realize that Henrietta was back in the barn at night. I should have, but I simply looked at her, willing her to understand that I understood. Yet she just sat there blankly. There was no more discussion about chaining them up. My mother left the table, and without a word our father finished his dinner. When he was through he didn’t put his fork down but just released hold of it. It hit his empty plate and clanked. When he left the room he shut the dining room door—a door shut only in winter, to preserve heat at night. Henrietta and I sat alone at the table, listening as in the kitchen our father pulled on his boots and went out to the barn to chain his horses up.

  * * *

  —

  That night, just after dusk, while my parents sat together in the living room, I walked across the hall to my sister’s room, expecting to try—and fail—to get her story out of her. I was only vaguely surprised to find she wasn’t there. I stood in her open doorway for a moment, then walked across the wood floor and stood alone in the center of her room. I turned in a slow, full circle a few times, absorbing her absence. I thought of telling my parents. Instead, I walked downstairs and out the door, entirely unnoticed, just as she must have gone. I crossed the yard to the barn and slid the door open so slowly, clenching my teeth at every creak and sigh of the old building. I tiptoed in, yet quickly discovered that she was not there, either. I went up the barn stairs, across the ladder, and inspected her secret belongings for the second time that day. Untouched since I’d last touched them, from what I could tell. I picked the bundle up and dropped it down over the ledge, to the first floor, and then returned down there. I went to the horse stalls and said hello to those poor, chained horses. I remember that I patted and kissed their snouts and talked to them in a way I never had before. “Where’s Henrietta?” I asked them. “Why is she always leaving?” After that, I went to her things. I spread out the blanket as though I were my sister. I sat on it, then lay back and dreamed of being her. Then I sat up again and opened that pack of cigarettes. It was the first time I had ever smoked. It took a long time to light, but once I figured it out I inhaled and coughed and doubled over, feeling dizzy and sick. I spit on it to put it out and then I threw it to the corner, and when my head stopped spinning I bundled all her things back up again but didn’t even bother returning them to her hiding spot upstairs. It was my signal to her, or, if my father came to the barn first, my outing of her. I went to bed.

  It was only an hour
or so later that I woke up. This time, it wasn’t to any creak of the old house but to the smell of smoke. I knew in an instant what I had done. I ran down the stairs. I don’t know if my panic woke my parents or if they too had smelled it. Anyway, they were close behind me as I ran. The front door was open, so I didn’t have to stop and squeeze the iron latch—only fly through the screen. There stood Henrietta, on the porch, facing the house and not the fire. She still wore a cutoff shirt, and her torso gleamed in the light of the flames. She also had a wad of green gum in her mouth. Usually her gum was pink, so this color struck me. It glowed nuclear there in the night.

  “What are you doing out?” my mother demanded, as though that were the problem. As though we could be so lucky.

  We could hear the horses’ screams; that was the worst of it. When the middle beam buckled and the entire structure went down our father sank to his knees. He had yelled for someone to do something, to stop, he had even yelled for God, but now he was finished. My mother had run inside to call the fire department and Henrietta and I had stayed on the porch. I’d been keeping my eyes on my father, but when he went to his knees I looked up, but not to the barn. My vision landed on the stone wall just at the edge of the field. There, in the light of the fire, I watched as a figure leapt over the rocks, into the woods.