by Zoje Stage
Her meditative work allowed her mind to wander away from reason and toward the unreasonable, where she felt more free to question the absolutes she’d always accepted. That was where the inky ghoul wanted her to go.
With a rigidity that now struck her as closed-minded, she’d been dismissive of astrology and feng shui, life after death and superstitions. (Though, like many dancers, she had a routine on performance days that was sacrosanct—the food she ate, the time she arrived at the theater, her preparations in the dressing room.) Her inner fuel, turning emotions into movement, would strike a lot of people as indulgent; many nonartists considered artists’ work to be pretentious, even a complete waste of time. But she’d always felt the inherent—even spiritual—worth of it. And she knew, through observation and experience, how agonizingly receptive a person could be—in tune with, and affected by, their surroundings. Her husband and daughter were living examples of people who absorbed the world in a deep, visceral way, as did many of their creative friends. She’d never disbelieved the complex reality of the highly sensitive people in her circle, or doubted the profound personal and interpersonal worth of an artist’s work. She wondered now if she should always have been more open to the other possibilities that human consciousness might tap into.
What else was out there?
Or maybe she was thinking of cause and effect all wrong. In a hysterical moment that morning, she’d tiptoed toward an idea very different from a ghost, something bigger that was responding to their thoughts, desires, fears. Something interactive was going on, action and reaction, but what was its genesis? Were they the music, or the dancers?
Are we doing this together? Are we dance partners?
Orla knew from experience that not all partnerships worked. Sometimes in a pas de deux, movements never became harmonious; the connection was off. That could be happening now. They didn’t know this dance, and maybe the choreographer should have chosen different dancers.
Or, playing devil’s advocate with herself, maybe the message wasn’t written in code; maybe her family was feeling too much and she was thinking too much, and all this time, the damn specter had been holding a billboard.
Wrong choice. Try again.
Shaw could be a painter elsewhere. He could have his turn in another house, with different trees. It was the talk they should have had a long time ago, but it wasn’t too late.
Orla knocked on the now-accessible landing window near the top of the stairs. Knocked and knocked until someone heard her. Unfortunately, it was Eleanor Queen who came to her rescue, glaring as she opened the window.
“Sorry, didn’t want to disturb you. Ask Papa to open our bedroom window? I’ll go around and come in that way.”
“I’ll get it.” Eleanor Queen shut the landing window and trudged off to her parents’ room.
As Orla clomped around to the front of the house, she said a quiet prayer. “Thank you. This has been very magnificent—something I never thought I’d see—but we’re ready to go back to normal now.”
She gave one last look across the tree-filled horizon. It was quiet beyond comparison, as if the rest of the world and every sound it made no longer existed. She wouldn’t allow herself to dwell on the beauty of it, the little overhangs that crested the drifts, like a landscape that had eroded and evolved over millions of years, not mere particles created in hours as they slept. To be in too much awe of it—too appreciative—might invite more wondrous and horrifying events.
Eleanor Queen opened her parents’ window as wide as it would go. Orla wriggled in backward, sat on the windowsill, and removed her snowshoes.
“Much safer now,” she told her daughter. She spun around and ducked in, sweaty beneath her layers but rejuvenated by the time she’d spent outdoors, engaged in difficult work. “Safe as houses.”
Eleanor Queen didn’t look relieved. She didn’t soften or grin. After one final glare, she turned and fled back to her room.
20
Can we play outside tomorrow?” Tycho asked, bouncing his floppy-legged moose on his belly as he lay tucked in bed.
Orla sighed as she knelt on the floor beside him. She didn’t know how to answer his question. How long would it take for so much snow to melt? Would they run out of provisions? She didn’t want to infect the children with her fear any more than she already had; she bore some responsibility for making their situation worse, for the subtle ways she’d affected the household’s overall mood, if not for the snow itself. What if she just answered, “Yes”? As an experiment in optimism if nothing else. Or what if—if they might really be dance partners—she took a stab at choreographing? It couldn’t hurt to express gratitude, appreciation…or even a desire to play outside.
As a young child, just a year or two older than Tycho, she’d kept a secret from her parents: sometimes she prayed. It was something she overheard relatives whispering about when her little brother got sick. But young Orla had prayed for silly things—to do well on a test; to ride her bike so fast she’d leave the ground and fly. Later, she understood the latter had been impossible while the former hadn’t required a deity but a bit more of her own effort. She’d learned a lot since then, much of it quite recently, at least where sending thoughts outward into a nether space might be concerned.
“Do you want to play a little game with me? Before you go to sleep?” she asked her son.
“Okay!” He started to sit up, but Orla stopped him with a gentle pressing of her hand.
“We can play it right here. All we have to do is shut our eyes.” She shut hers by way of example, then peeked to make sure Tycho had shut his too. She couldn’t help but smile at the expectant look on his face, his tightly clenched eyes and hopeful grin. “Sometimes it’s good to acknowledge what you have—the people you love, your home, the important things. Maybe we need to do that a little more often.”
Focusing on the positive might also be a balm against her very real worries.
“I’m so grateful we’re all safe and snug in our warm house. You’re safe, and so is your sister, and Papa, and me. We have electricity and food and everything we need. I’m thankful…we’ve seen so many beautiful things—”
“Like the snow!”
Her boy’s muscles, beneath the hand she’d kept on his chest, telegraphed his readiness to spring into action. And Orla saw she was right when she opened her eyes; his eyes were already wide open.
“Like the snow! Is playing better than praying?” she asked. He nodded with great enthusiasm and she laughed. “Well, maybe we need to add a little something to our prayer, a wish that we can go outside and play tomorrow.”
“That’s what I wish for! And ice cream!”
“It’s a good hope. But I can’t promise anything, love.” Orla smoothed his hair, tucked the moose under his arm, tugged up the comforter.
“Are we praying to God?”
Orla considered his question. They hadn’t talked much about religion as a family. She and Shaw had kept things vague—people had different beliefs, and maybe there was a higher power, but the most important thing was how people treated one another. Neither of them had wanted the children to believe there was a humanoid—a, God forbid, white man—hanging out in a fictitious wonderland waiting for them to die. A humanoid invested in—and responsive to—everything from their daily routine to catastrophic disasters to personal and global suffering.
“I’m not sure what God is,” Orla said, truthfully. “But I think the universe contains powerful and mysterious things. And I think it doesn’t hurt to say thank you, and think positively.”
“Thank you!”
She gave him kisses on his cheek until he giggled and held out his moose. “Thank you for praying with me,” she said after giving the moose a kiss. In fact, she did feel somewhat better. Looking at things objectively, she realized they were okay. So far. “I love you. Good night.”
“Good night, snow!”
Eleanor Queen, book propped on her chest, scrutinized her mother. Orla stayed on her kn
ees beside her daughter’s bed.
“What are we praying to?” the girl asked, her intense gaze unwavering.
Orla held up her hands and gestured to a whimsical universe, the everything, the unknown. “To…whatever’s out there. People find it comforting—”
“Can you hear it?”
“Hear it?”
“The thing that’s out there? On the land?” Her chin quivered as her eyelashes beat away the tears. The girl looked hopeful and expectant. And terrified.
“You hear something…” It wasn’t a question but the faint vocalization of Orla’s worst fear. The hairs on her shoulders tingled. It hadn’t been her imagination, her daughter’s behavior. Her husband’s. She didn’t know what it meant, except that her daughter needed her. More than ever. “I’ve been…suspicious, but I don’t know what it is that you, Papa—”
“Something is out there, Mama.”
Her daughter’s whispered words sent a piercing pain through Orla’s brain, the pounding of a spike. She hadn’t wanted to take her imaginative child too literally before, but she couldn’t keep denying that Eleanor Queen had been trying to make her understand something. Orla wanted to dismiss it as a game or a hallucination, auditory or otherwise, but that wouldn’t erase what she saw on her daughter’s drained face. And Shaw was writing down words! Perhaps her child was ill? Her husband too? The fox-hare delirium knocked on its door, wanting back into Orla’s consciousness. Maybe they were all crazy.
Or maybe they weren’t.
Orla treaded carefully, not sure of the territory they were entering. “I know the weather’s been a little scary, but—”
“It’s more than that.”
Yes, Orla believed that, if she was being completely honest. She studied her daughter, small and frightened in her first solitary bed, her first room. Orla couldn’t brush it away anymore, chalk it up to Eleanor Queen being afraid to sleep by herself (even with the safe glow of the recovered night-light), or her own trepidations about such an unfamiliar place.
The words were sludge in her mouth, but she had to make them sound normal. “What do you think it is?”
Eleanor Queen turned her head toward her window and narrowed her eyes in concentration. “I’m not sure. Sometimes I think I hear it, something calling. Sometimes it’s just a feeling, but it’s…many things at once. Excited. Scared. Needy. I thought for a while that Papa heard it, I was sure he did. But Papa doesn’t want to hear it. I thought you were refusing to too. I’m glad you know…something’s here.”
Orla’s back tightened and a shiver came on so hard that it filled her mouth with bile. All she heard her daughter saying was You’re failing me. Orla vowed to stop fighting herself, to stop talking herself out of things no matter how impossible they seemed. One way or another, she needed to protect her daughter. Would Eleanor Queen find relief or terror in the history they’d discovered? Could that be the source of her voices? But she wasn’t quite ready to have a conversation about ghosts, not before she and Shaw decided on a resolution. We’ll leave, that will fix it.
“It’s scary, because we don’t understand this place yet,” said Orla. “But that doesn’t mean it’s bad.”
Eleanor Queen drew a long breath in through her nose. She turned onto her side and scrunched down so her face was closer to Orla’s, and they studied each other. Maybe they looked the same, with a squint of worry as they tried to read each other’s mind.
“I know you haven’t always been comfortable here, and I’m sorry I wasn’t…I thought you, all of us, needed time,” Orla said. “But now…I’ve been a little afraid too, and I think I haven’t been a very good role model. I’m not gonna let myself be afraid of the weather anymore, not when what really scares me is that you’re scared and I don’t know how to help. Bean, I’m here—I’m always here for you, you can talk to me.” That would always be true, even as she grappled to make sense of everything else.
A tiny grin brightened her daughter’s face.
Orla clutched herself tighter as she knelt beside the bed. Anxiety was getting the better of them, but that didn’t mean her daughter—her husband—couldn’t persevere. She still wasn’t sure what to prescribe or where to look for answers, but she needed Eleanor Queen to understand she wasn’t alone and that her mother was trying to—would—help.
“How would you like things to be different? Let’s think about what would be good, what would make you happier.” Orla pushed apart two storm fronts as they threatened to crush her—one an optimistic possibility where they could still find their equilibrium in this new place, the other the louder, more worrying likelihood that they’d made a terrible, unfathomable error.
Eleanor Queen flipped onto her back and a more relaxed, dreamy expression brought a glow to her cheeks. “I guess I’d like…it’s weird being in the house all the time, all of us. I thought I’d like it, but…I guess you’re right, if the weather wasn’t so bad and we could get out. Do you think there’s someplace nearby where I could take violin lessons?”
Orla sat back a little, fighting to keep the surprise from registering on her face. Where had that desire come from? In the city, they’d offered her every variety of lesson: dance, art, music. Eleanor Queen had never been interested. She’d enjoyed those classes at school, but refused their offers to expand her abilities with more focused studies. What unbelievably horrible timing.
“Bean…”
“I know, I know what you’re thinking.” Eleanor Queen shoved her arms under the covers, and yanked the blankets all the way up to her chin, frustrated. “I didn’t need more things to do in the city. But I need more things to do here. I don’t miss school but I miss…I always thought maybe someday I’d want to try an instrument, but there wasn’t room at home. I didn’t want everyone hearing me practice if I was really bad at it. But I could close my door here. I’d really like to play a quiet instrument, something no one else could hear, but I don’t know what that is.”
“Oh love.” Eleanor Queen was thinking in the right direction, toward making the most of their new situation, doing here what she hadn’t needed or felt comfortable doing in their Chelsea apartment. But Orla felt the thin membranes of her shame stretching and threatening to tear; she should’ve known how self-conscious her daughter was and how she might need some personal space to explore her private dreams. “I’m sure we can find someone local. Papa knows of a school that teaches different kinds of art classes; we can start there. And we’ll find something. And you don’t ever have to worry about us judging you—it takes time for anyone to learn a new skill. Okay?”
“You’re not mad?”
“Why would I be mad?”
Eleanor Queen shrugged. “I feel like…maybe I’m not exactly the same person here as I was in the city.”
“There’s no reason why I’d ever love you any less.”
“I wasn’t sure, because…never mind.”
Orla leaned over and kissed her forehead and cheek. “It was part of the idea for coming here, that we’d all be a little different—and maybe love each other even more. We go somewhere new and learn new things about ourselves. No one’s exactly who they were. Every day we’re slightly different, right? We learn something new and we’re not entirely the same anymore. Papa and I want that too, for you, for us. That we all keep growing and making discoveries. So if you want to try music lessons now, we’ll make that happen. Papa and I will make it happen.”
“I like it here, some parts of it. But I wish…” She silenced her wish and chewed her lip.
“Tell me what you wish.”
“I wish…we had a house with neighbors. In town. And a street, like what you see on TV. With kids riding bikes and going to each other’s houses to play.”
The tears rose quickly in Orla’s throat. Her daughter could have been describing Squirrel Hill, the neighborhood she’d grown up in in Pittsburgh. It was clearer than ever they’d made a mistake in staying in Manhattan for so long. Other families made it work, but Eleanor Queen needed—lo
nged for—something else. Something she’d never felt confident to voice. Maybe that first day when they moved in, the thing Eleanor Queen had been looking at in the yard hadn’t been something that frightened her, but something that broke her heart: No neighbors. No people. From one extreme to another.
A tear slipped from Orla’s eye; she couldn’t promise her daughter the neighborhood she wanted. Maybe she and Shaw had only pretended to include their children in their decision-making. When they’d asked, “Do you want to move to our own house, with a big yard and lots of trees?” how many answers would they actually have heard?
“I’m sorry. I know it’s not exactly what you wanted, but when the weather’s better we’ll make sure we find the lessons you want to take, and we’ll find some places where you can make friends. It always takes a little while to adjust after a move.” Maybe we’ll move again.
“I know.”
Orla gave her fierce kisses. “I love you so much.”
“I know. I love you too.”
Orla flicked on the night-light on her way out.
“It’s okay, I don’t need it anymore,” said Eleanor Queen.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. The darkness helps me think.”
Orla switched off the light and blew her a kiss. Unwilling to leave her daughter in complete darkness, she left the door open a crack, overwhelmed by a burden of new worries. They were not, as parents, the good listeners they’d imagined themselves to be. She committed to correcting that. She’d study her daughter more closely and ask more questions. But in the meantime, it troubled her what Eleanor Queen had heard—out there, “on the land.” If they were going to stay even a day longer, they needed to figure out what to tell her. Would the specificity of dead tuberculosis patients seem less frightening than the vague “many things” she was sensing? It was almost laughable that Orla was considering easing her daughter’s fears with the “It’s just ghosts” explanation. And she couldn’t shake the apprehension that her daughter’s higher power was more present than hers. What if the girl whispered her prayers to something utterly different than the faceless goddesses Orla only pretended to know?