The Den

by Abi Maxwell

  * * *

  —

  By the time the firemen arrived, there wasn’t anything to be saved. Still, they worked for hours spraying the flames, and within a day the cleanup crew and dumpsters showed up. I stayed in my room, where hour after hour I replayed the events in my mind. Somewhere between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m. I had put out a cigarette. But how well had I put it out? And when I’d thrown it, how close to the hay had it landed? By 11:00 the entire barn had been engulfed.

  “How do barn fires start?” I’d tiptoed to my mother’s studio to ask more than once.

  “Sparks.” She’d shrug every time, and not even look up at me. But I had wanted details, wanted to know exactly how long it was possible for a spark to smolder before it caught. I was looking for someone to say that one to two hours was way too long from cigarette to fire. I knew my father would have told me the answer, which is exactly why I didn’t ask him. Instead, I focused on the next piece in the story: The barn buckles and a figure crosses over the stone wall at the edge of our field, into our woods. I watched that figure over and over again in my mind. I was guilty, I knew I was. I also knew that my sister had been standing right there, that if I were looking for a chance at innocence, she would be my obvious choice. But I would not make that my sister’s story. So, as I drifted in and out of sleep each night, I held that figure close. With its existence, it seemed to me that there was one tiny seed of hope that I had not caused the fire.

  * * *

  —

  When the police officer came to our house, our father cursed at having thrown out that threatening note from Mr. Cutler.

  “Jesus Christ,” our mother said. “This isn’t some witch hunt.”

  “He threatened us,” our father told the officer, but then I watched his entire demeanor shift. He let out a loud breath and slumped into a chair at the kitchen table. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Forget I said that.”

  The officer nodded. He was old and overweight and he had an almost constant boyish smile. He gave us his card, asked us to call with any information, and left. Soon after, we heard that Mr. Cutler had indeed been questioned, and that it had led to nothing. “Did you know he has a daughter?” I heard our father ask our mother. “That never occurred to me. Lives in Florida. She and her family were visiting that whole week.”

  Our mother just shrugged and wandered to the living room. She had never suspected Mr. Cutler of anything, and anyway, she wasn’t interested in assigning blame. From her perspective, barns burned down all the time and—surely because of Henrietta—we were better off not finding out exactly why ours had.

  * * *

  —

  I like to think of the trajectory of our family’s lives as determined by Henrietta’s actions, but the truth has to be that after the fire we could have gone on in our new way: each of us in our own place, silent, contained. The truth is that it was I who, one night at the dinner table, could no longer bear the silence I had caused, nor the tight, angry face of our father. It was I who mumbled, with no other reason than to call our little family back, “I saw a coyote.”

  “What did you say?” my father asked.

  It was like a bolt of lightning. I knew what I had said, but suddenly my mind lit up and I knew what I had seen, too. Kaus. His fluid leap over the stone wall. Just then I was sure. I could be innocent. I said his name. “Kaus,” I said. “At the fire. Running away.”

  I couldn’t have looked up at Henrietta after that, I know I couldn’t have. Still I can see the look she shot me. I can feel it, the way it held my being. So cold, so exquisitely cold and pitiless.

  * * *

  —

  After that, it all happened so quickly. He was blamed, and until he was sent away, Henrietta was forbidden from speaking to him, and my parents kept a careful watch on her to ensure that she wouldn’t. Only once was I asked for my story, and even though by that point my surety had begun to fade, I still told it. A few weeks later, I overheard my parents saying that Kaus had been sent to YDC, that mythical child prison we had heard rumors of at school.

  Our parents fought over the punishment, our mother demanding that he was up against too much, that he had been marked as guilty from the start, that he couldn’t be asked to make his way in our small, white town.

  “His family doesn’t speak English, Charley,” she said.

  But our father was insistent. “You do not burn down a barn,” he told her. “You do not burn down a goddamn barn.”

  “A cigarette, Charley,” our mother said. “It’s not as if he burned the barn down on purpose.”

  A cigarette. Though I’d known this all along, this was the first time I had actually heard it. I went to my room, my head pounding. I closed my eyes and watched as over and over again a coyote, and not Kaus, crested that stone wall. I opened them and drew my sister to mind. My sister. What had she been doing out on that night, anyway? I closed my eyes again, and magically that figure leaping over the stone wall transformed once more to the form of that teenage boy who had loved her, who had stolen her, who for all I knew could have killed her.

  Anyway, someone had to do something to keep that boy away from my sister. And god knows my parents wouldn’t have.

  III

  IN THE days when Henrietta and I would play house in The Den, we especially liked to pretend to be the people who used to live there, and act out how they might have spent their time. Mostly it was in chores. Henrietta would stand at the crumbling fireplace and pretend to stir a pot of stew; she would place an imaginary loaf of bread on a stone to bake in the fire’s warmth; she would wield a stick for a broom and sweep about the house, listing orders for me: Bring the flour, bring the sugar, go outside to wash and hang the laundry. It’s nighttime, go to bed. That part, I think, was my favorite. I would lie down on the pine needles and Henrietta would tuck me in and give my head a quick kiss. I would close my eyes, gulp in that sharp, earthy smell, and then I really would picture the people I imagined had lived in that house. I would see their slow walks to the well to fill buckets with drinking water and their naked bodies bathing modestly in the stream. I would see the snow and cold, the candlelight. I loved that they had lived in our woods rather than near the road; it allowed me to imagine that they were people whose bodies had practically grown up from the soil itself. I saw them bedding down in the moss on hot afternoons, and then making the long trek to the nearby lake to fish for dinner.

  Because of the coyote story our father had told us, our game of house always had momentum, and perhaps that is why we were so drawn to it. We were cooking, we were cleaning, we were sleeping, and danger perpetually lurked. “Keep an eye out,” Henrietta would tell me dutifully before I passed over the threshold. “I think I saw one! I think I saw one!” I would yell, rushing back into the square foundation, slamming and locking the imagined door behind me. But then I would go to the imagined window and peer out, or I would unlock the door again. I would tempt the mythical animal to come and get us, desperate to find out what lay on the other side of that destruction. In the realm of possibilities, death did not exist to me. Rather, I wondered if we, too, would become coyotes. Or perhaps we would just spin in the belly of the animal until an unsuspecting hunter came along and cut him open to set us free? Once I asked Henrietta’s opinion, and her response had been to quit playing and walk home. I understood, sort of. My sister was practical. Our game in the woods felt like the only place and time she would enter with me into that fantastical world that I so loved. I wasn’t to push it too far.

  Once, while digging around on the outskirts of the foundation—doing my chore of gardening, as Henrietta had instructed—I found a bent, rusted shovel with no handle left. It was the first artifact I had ever found out there, and as I held it in my hands I felt time shrink. Of course I lived in a house that was just as old as that foundation, probably older; every day, I shut doors and climbed stairs that others before me had shut
and climbed. Also, our house was filled with antiques and I understood that some time ago they had not been relics but tools. Yet none of that had quite the effect that holding that shovel had. Perhaps it was because I had been the one to actually unearth the tool. My hands in the dirt, I had been pretending to be the child of that home, and when those hands found the metal it was as though I actually became, for a moment, that very child.

  Over the years, we found a few other things out there. A chunk of off-white broken ceramic, an hourglass-shaped bottle with a chip at the rim. We placed all the artifacts inside the house, in the section near the fireplace that we had designated the kitchen. Throughout Henrietta’s love affair with Kaus, those artifacts had remained. Before the barn burned, I would wonder if she told him about what that place had been to us, or if she—at least privately, without Kaus knowing—was, in a sense, continuing our game of house, this time with a husband.

  After the barn burned and Henrietta went nowhere but to her room, The Den became my retreat. I would lie out there and watch the leaves rustle overhead. Soon school began and the wind shifted, became sharper. Our mother shifted, too; she began to make us pancakes or eggs or even just fill our bowls with cereal in the morning, and after school she would meet us in the kitchen with a snack—apples and cheese, crackers spread thick with peanut butter. I would eat; Henrietta wouldn’t. She would go to her room. My mother would stay with me, asking questions that I felt were her obligatory effort to pull her family back together; she never commented on my responses, but just returned to her studio the moment I finished speaking. I would wander outside. Often I would leave through the rarely used front door and loop around the far side of the house toward the woods, thus avoiding the former site of the barn.

  Sometimes, though, I would be overcome by another mood entirely, and I would go right to that site. As with The Den, only granite remained, but there had been a cellar in the barn, which meant that now our land housed a gaping black hole. I would stare down into it and wonder over the fate of the horses’ bones, hoping they had been tilled back into the soil and not thrown out with the metal and plastic that had gone into the dumpsters. I had no religious upbringing, had never even been to church, but at some point I began to pray while I stood there. Please, I would say. Please what, and to whom? I wasn’t quite sure. Still, Please, please, please. Also, I am so sorry.

  * * *

  —

  “Good news!” my father said one evening in early September when I wandered in from the edge of the barn’s pit, dazed. The table was set and my mother and sister were already in the kitchen. We looked at him, waiting. His statement felt so improbable.

  “New neighbors!” he said. He told us that Mr. Cutler was moving out, going to Florida, and that a new family had bought the place already. The father, an orthopedist named Dr. Hennessey, had recently begun a job at the hospital where my father worked, and he was staying in the small motel in town while his wife and twin daughters stayed on in Boston, waiting for the house to be ready.

  “I never saw a sign up,” my mother snapped. “Was Mr. Cutler’s place even for sale?”

  “Christ, Sylvia,” our father said. “Obviously it was for sale.” My mother glared at him, but I understood his tone. For years our parents had wished that a family with children for us to play with had lived nearby, rather than our strange neighbor. But now my mother refused to join in the excitement. She wanted to know why this new family wouldn’t buy a fancy house on the wealthy street in town, as all the doctors did.

  “Thirty acres,” our father said. “And for cheap.”

  Our mother scoffed. City people moving in on her turf, she meant. It was a hatred central to her character, and it was exasperated by the fact that the very next week, after Mr. Cutler had vacated, worker trucks and machinery began to drive up and down our road.

  “That house was in fine shape,” our mother would say. “If they wanted a new house they should have bought a new house.”

  But I was intrigued. I began to cross from The Den through the woods to the edge of the road to monitor the progress. I couldn’t tell exactly what the workers were doing, other than painting, because most of the work took place inside. Still, looking at the outside of that house was enough. The new paint job seemed to bring out its elaborate features, and it was as though I had never seen it before. It was just the kind of place I liked, with scalloped shingles, high gables, and dripping gingerbread trim that reminded me of those gothic tales I so loved. I would huddle behind the stone wall and stare at the attic window, dreaming up the sorts of mysteries that might lurk there.

  Finally, one afternoon I watched as the moving trucks pulled in and began to unload. That very night, our father told us that the Hennessey family would arrive on Saturday, and that the following week, Henrietta and I would begin a new job. Apparently, the Hennesseys wanted to go on a date every Friday, and they needed a sitter.

  “Nine-year-old twins,” our father said. “It will be a blast!”

  “No,” our mother told him. She said it was too much. It was her new role. In addition to helping us before and after school, she would stay with us on the weekends and ask us the sort of question I’d always imagined a typical mother might ask—did we have enough clean clothes for the week, was there anything she might iron, was there something special we wanted from the grocery store. Often, when my sister sat at the table, my mother would stand behind her and lift her long hair up and let it fall down lightly, piece by piece. She was protective, now, of her girls—at least of Henrietta—and she didn’t want us to babysit, especially not at a stranger’s house.

  “They’re not strangers,” our father argued. In a way, I suppose he was right. Our father and the doctor had formed a friendship, inspired, so far as I could tell, by the proximity of our houses to each other. They would eat lunch together at work, and they’d even once gone out for a beer, something we had never known our father to do. Now he looked at our mother and he pleaded. “Let them earn some money,” he said. “It’s right up the road.” And then he nodded upstairs, toward the room where Henrietta spent so much time, and he said, “It’s good for them, Sylvia. Gets them out of the house.”

  * * *

  —

  Our first night babysitting, I dressed carefully and put my hair up, trying to appear as mature as possible. Henrietta, however, wore her typical outfit: ripped jeans, an old, oversized flannel shirt—this one, thankfully, not cut off—and the cheap sandals that she refused to retire despite the fact that her feet must have been freezing in them. Twenty minutes before we were due at the Hennesseys’ I said goodbye to my parents and then I waited at the door, calling and calling for my sister to hurry up, yet she just slouched around, scuffing her feet and looking at her fingernails, carelessly applying lip gloss and twirling her hair. Finally my father told her to get going before she lost her first job.

  We walked silently up the hill. It was late September by then. The crisp air reminded me of just how long it had been since I had walked beside my sister. Now I racked my mind for something to say to her but could think of nothing. We walked in silence until ahead of us in the dim light we saw the doctor appear on the road near his new house. Then Henrietta said, “Jesus God.”

  I knew what she meant. Because Dr. Hennessey was a father, I suppose I had expected him to look more or less like our own father—a bit run-down, a bit heavy in the middle, and harboring the mildest of eyes. But this doctor was young and he was gorgeous.

  “Henrietta,” he said as we approached. “And you must be Jane.”

  “Dr. Hennessey,” my sister said easily.

  “Jack,” he said. “Call me Jack.” He shook our hands, and I remember noticing that his skin was impossibly soft. His look, too. He had a singular way of looking intently at each one of us when we spoke, as though our words were little treasures he had waited for.

  “I was just checking out the lamp
when I saw you coming up the hill,” he said now, and pointed. It was an old-fashioned streetlamp, which they’d installed at the edge of their drive. A streetlamp on a country road—right away I thought of how my mother would mock it.

  Henrietta, however, must not have had the same thought. She said, “Wow, Jack, that is so cool.” Jack. Even though he had just told us to call him that, her use of the name still seemed so bold.

  “Can’t get the thing to work,” he said. “Anyway. Show yourselves to the door. Les is waiting for you.” He pointed toward the porch, and Henrietta walked ahead of me, her constant, newfound slouch suddenly gone. It was she who rang the doorbell, and when Les answered, my sister immediately extended her own hand to shake. “I’m Henrietta,” she announced, as though she were the happiest person in the world. “And this is my sister, Jane. Welcome to the neighborhood!”

  * * *

  —

  The twins were seven, not nine, and they did not listen to their mother. The front door opened onto the stairway, and as Les ushered us in she called up for her girls, but they did not respond. Next she rushed us through the front room and into the kitchen. She went to the new, gleaming granite countertop and began to fuss about, straightening the small stack of mail, wiping down an already clean counter, and stopping now and then to yell again for her girls. Finally she stopped and looked at us and said, “It’s that damn attic, they’re obsessed.” Then she went right back to rushing about, and as she did so she listed orders for us: “Spaghetti for dinner. You girls do know how to boil pasta, right? Only one soda and one dessert each. No eating outside of the kitchen. Lock the doors after we’ve left, okay?”