by Julia Fine
“Hello, sweet darling,” said Linda in a voice that didn’t match her words, serious and low like she was lecturing a group of college students, not cooing at a baby. I appreciated this sincerity; I didn’t see what good it did children to be spoken to as such—there’d be no babbling or baby talk for Clara from us. The ushy-gushy cootchie-coos were dangerous, they weren’t language and they told an ugly lie about the nature and purpose of language. I imagined Michael leaning over Clara’s bassinet, her voice scrunched like an accordion, Who’s a good boogie baby, who’s a good ickle boo. But we were at Linda and Seth’s house, ten miles away from Michael, and I wouldn’t let her spoil the holiday.
“Can I help in the kitchen?” I asked, and was immediately set to work washing and peeling more potatoes. Linda had bought what seemed like several pounds too many, as if trying to make up for all the past latke-less years.
“Clara just eats milk, Mom,” Ben said. “You know that, right?”
“We can freeze the leftovers,” said Linda.
Seth brought out the scotch, and we toasted to Clara, the menorah on the counter candle-less and forgotten as evening eased into night. Linda had bought a giant pink teddy bear, three times the size of Clara, and we took photos of her propped in its lap, falling over into its furry paunch, from which she emerged startled but not, we thought, unhappy. This was her general demeanor—surprised but not unhappily so—the excitement of a new place and new people having little effect on her kewpie doll nose, her invisible eyebrows, her cockled, heart-shaped lips. Only when she saw me did she seem truly alert, her eyes casting off that glazed perplexity and sending a beacon directly to my chest.
“She loves her mama,” said Linda, giving her approval for what could, for all I knew, be the only time in our shared history. I relaxed into the luck of it all, Ben rubbing my back and smiling, Seth showing us the ice mold that would keep his liquor cold and undiluted, Linda subconsciously conducting the classical music that played as she cooked. I almost didn’t want to take Clara downstairs to sleep, I didn’t want to lose the balance of this one precarious moment, this small happiness. But I sent Ben out to get more of our gear from the car, because it was nearing nine o’clock, and Clara was lifting her arm above her head in the way that I knew meant she was tired.
I fed her in the basement while Ben set up the pack ’n’ play, Clara so hungry that she didn’t even turn her head to see what he was doing. We’d brought too much with us, we said. We wouldn’t even unpack most of it. I suggested that we skip her nightly bath.
“But will she sleep?” Ben asked, puppy-dog eager. We’d read that it was never too early to establish a routine: a bath, a book, a good night’s sleep. Clara would sleep here in the downstairs office—Linda’s “craft room”—under the eye of the plug-in baby monitor, while we would be next door, in the narrow guest bedroom. I didn’t think she was going to sleep well regardless, in this foreign room with its chilly air and one curtainless window, but I knew that Ben wanted to help with her bath, wanted to comb her tufty hair and powder her and zip her into the sleep sack with the cows leaping the moons. This was the house he had grown up in, and he wanted a similar childhood for Clara.
Afterward, the three of us sat together on the floor by the pack ’n’ play and read stories, Ben holding Clara so that she could see me turn the pages, though her eyes never settled on the book. She was looking at the window, high in the wall, looking out onto a composite night. Something brushed against the glass—whatever still grew in the gelid ground of Linda’s garden, a barren bush, a bramble. Tap tap tap.
As I turned the final page, we saw Clara’s face melt into the satisfied smirk of having just released her bowels. Ben winced at the smell.
“I’ll change her and put her down,” I said. “You go visit with your parents.”
Tap.
It’s difficult to change a dirty diaper on a carpet.
Tap tap.
I sang to Clara, put her in dry pajamas, zipped her and folded her into her swaddle. The sound machine sighed pleasantly, and she had her eyes open when I placed her in the pack ’n’ play, on her back, just under the monitor’s camera. While I climbed the stairs I stared at her image in the display screen, two shining orbs her open eyes. She squirmed a bit, but didn’t cry.
Tap tap tap.
THEY’D MOVED INTO the living room—Linda, Ben, and Seth—and moved on to a third round of whiskies. I sat on the bench of Ben’s childhood piano and watched his mother swilling her tumbler, watched the tremors lacing through his father’s hands.
“We forgot to light the candles,” said Linda. Then the debate over whether we had missed the crucial moment—sundown—and would be better served waiting until tomorrow. I thought that if God cared about when we lit the candles, then God was no better than Michael, just another petty ghost. We should light them; we should put the menorah in the window and announce ourselves. But Linda didn’t want to, and it was Linda’s house, so we didn’t.
Seth started talking about candles. He was drunk. He talked about how in Judaism candles represented the soul, flickering, weak, eventually snuffed out. All the while Linda did that thing where she looked at me, squinting, trying to figure out if I understood the basic tenets of the faith in which I had been raised. I ignored the stare in favor of the memory of her praise.
It made sense that Jewish candles were lives, that flames were souls. With the exception of the Ner Tamid, the flame that burned forever in the synagogue, the candles that we lit were designed to burn out. They were long and thin and crammed into their holders, threatening to fall. Nothing like the candles I lit throughout the year at home, which came in squat jars with lids, which were meant to be snuffed and relit, which emitted cloying vanilla and mulberry and barely even flickered.
Seth was tossing around Yiddish like a name-dropping socialite trying to score an invitation to a party, Linda bobble-headed, well aware that she’d be his plus-one. Ben’s glass was empty. He was rising from the couch to refill it when we heard Clara scream.
The sound came, tinny, from the monitor, but she was loud enough that we also heard her cries from downstairs. I took a breath, trying not to be hasty. Sometimes she’d cry out in her sleep and then settle, and letting her handle herself could save me hours of grief.
“Time to sleep,” I whispered, as if she could hear me. I pressed the button that should show Clara’s image, but didn’t see her little body on the screen. The monitor had arrows that controlled the camera’s pivot, and I searched with the track pad, scanning up and then down. The crying had stopped. She was probably fine, but I still couldn’t see her.
“Ben,” I said, “come here.” I showed him the swerve of the camera. “Where is she?”
“Hmm,” he said, repeating exactly what I’d just done as if he could do it better. “Short-circuited, maybe? I bet it’s the picture from before you put her down. She isn’t crying anymore. We shouldn’t bug her.” As if seeing her mother would be an inconvenience. As if Clara had better things to do.
“If you need to go see her, you go down and see her. You do what makes you feel safe,” said Linda, again in my corner. But I had no time to thank her, no time to register my surprise. Clara was crying again, the red light on the monitor flashing. I stared at the lack of her as I took the stairs two at a time, already knowing. The greasy, undigested remnants of my dinner roiling in my stomach, a heaviness settling across my chest. The crying triggered something primal, a mix of guilt and self-importance, a centuries-old fear.
I paused outside the door, willing Clara to be there, willing an electrical fault or a dead battery, a simple explanation. As I walked into the room I prayed silently, Leave us alone.
Until I saw Clara lying in the pack ’n’ play I didn’t know how tightly I’d been holding my shoulders, my breath. She was whimpering, come undone from her swaddle, one hand pressed against the mesh sides of the crib, the other clutching a pacifier, which I supposed she was unable to return to her mouth on her own. But this
wasn’t why she was crying, at least not solely why.
The overhead fan hadn’t been on when I left the room—I knew because I’d worried about the cold, dressed Clara in her fleecy pajamas, debated adding a blanket before deciding that I wouldn’t because the risk of SIDS was greater than the risk of being chilly. Now the fan was spinning so violently, I thought it would detach from the ceiling. Linda’s knitting had been thrown from the desk, a luminescent snarl of yarn. Her scrapbook materials were scattered, a pair of scissors open on the floor. The desk chair was overturned, the computer monitor flashing. I was afraid to touch any of it, afraid that it all contained Michael. She’d touched these things and might be waiting. I’d be stupid to open myself up to her, to try to move the things she’d already infused. Instead I scooped Clara from the flat mattress of the pack ’n’ play and held her very close to me, shushing her, nuzzling her, telling her not to cry.
The door slammed shut behind me. The monitor’s camera scanned the room, circling and wheezing. The console sat on the floor next to us, untouched. This was not Ben, or Linda. This was not Seth, or Solly, or my sister. Not Arthur upstairs, not Garbage Greg. This was not lack of sleep or grogginess from painkillers or hormonal shifts. The camera settled right on us. It crackled.
Then the computer monitor flashed again, the little LED light in the corner blinking on and off. The fan aggressive, threatening. A howling wind outside. If I had been hidden within the eye of the storm when I entered the room, it had now found me.
If I took Clara upstairs, Ben would comment. He’d say something like “I thought we agreed to let her cry it out,” which we had not agreed to, but which he liked to bring up as if we had, couldn’t not mention. Linda might be on my side. Linda, who knew what it was to be a mother, who still called her sons every few days, who still reached out for them with clear-polished fingers. Linda would say “If this is what she needs, you do it,” and I would feel profoundly grateful. I wouldn’t have to explain, but could tuck Clara between us on the guest bed, keep away from this office until morning.
I balanced Clara on my shoulder, headed toward the door. As I reached for the doorknob I felt the craft supplies following me. Drifting at first, then gaining speed. Expensive scrapbook stickers—WELCOME BABY, a miniature bottle, little mixed-media choking hazards—swirled up around me, and I ducked to avoid a sharp-pointed cardboard star. We were steps away from safety. My hand was on the doorknob. And then suddenly the doorknob was hot, gleaming turquoise, liquescent. Gasping, I shot backward, my fingers pulsing from the burn. I felt dizzy, as if I myself were melting. We were trapped in this room and the doorknob was melting. My eyes peeled wide, I watched it melt away until there was only the solid wood door. We were stuck here, the crafting scissors sharp and gleaming.
Clara sensed my fear, and again began to cry.
“Please,” I said to Michael, but I didn’t know what to ask her that I hadn’t asked already. Ribbons floated up like seaweed, weightless at first and then creeping into my hair, binding my wrists. All I could do was make a fortress of my body, sit with Clara in the armchair and bare the brunt to protect her.
“You are ribbons,” I said, because to acknowledge them as ribbons, to name them, ribbons, broke the spell. And as I spoke they—one by one—became inanimate, dropping suddenly, in the way of the dead. “The ribbons, the ribbons, the ribbons.” Down and down and down. Naming gave power to the namer. Power, like a state of matter—it couldn’t multiply; it must be redistributed. I would name the objects, and thus take power from Michael, who couldn’t speak.
“The stickers. The scissors. The books.” I spoke rhythmically, with the accentuated iambs that would help to calm Clara. “The knitting needles.” Sharp, too near our eyes. “The yarn.” Unraveling: a pair of mittens too small for a child, too large for my girl. “The doorknob?” But it couldn’t be a question. “The doorknob,” I asserted, and it reappeared. “The door. The window. The light.”
Clara was falling back asleep, her body slack, and I tightened my grip. I was afraid that in her sleep she’d go to Michael, and was tempted to pinch her awake. But the room was settling. The fan was slowing down. The computer had ceased its relentless flashes of light and had faded to black.
“The needles. The thread. The carpet. The dried flowers.”
A mantra of the physical. A prayer. I was praying mundanity back into existence. Time passed. “The spinning fan. The desktop computer.”
I put Clara back in the pack ’n’ play, where she lay still but for her breathing, yet I kept rocking. I kept whispering. “The keyboard. The stuffed giraffe. The armchair. The lamp.” Upstairs, Ben was walking across the kitchen floor, opening a cupboard, shutting it. Linda mumbled something, and Seth laughed.
“The throw pillows. The white noise.” But no, now I was incorrect. I’d named it incorrectly. The noise was not a tangible thing, thus could not ground me. I braced for impact.
My phone sat in the corner, turned facedown so that the light wouldn’t disturb Clara. It was vibrating, a harsh buzz against the plastic rug protector. There was no internet or cell service down here in the basement. Linda always missed our calls when she was crafting. We’d emerge from a night at Ben’s parents’ with a wealth of social media notifications. But there it was, ringing.
Would I answer? Was I capable of answering? I didn’t even like to answer the phone when I knew who was calling, when I liked who was calling. I really only talked to Annie, or to Ben. I wouldn’t answer.
I waited, clutching my elbows. The vibrating stopped. The room was still. And then, as I had known it would, the cell phone shuddered as a voice mail chimed through. Delete it, I told myself. I didn’t.
I pressed play and held the phone to my ear. I heard piano music, very soft at first, almost imperceptible. Little runs of notes, familiar but not enough to place until the bass line came in, the pounding chords I knew were Chopin’s “Raindrop” prelude, because I remembered my childhood piano teacher tapping my shoulder, stressing the importance of the rhythm. I remembered my hands struggling to keep pace, her stern call for forte. I’d quit lessons not long after, complaining that she made me take the polish off my nails. My mother had said, “Fine then, save me the money.”
There was a voice now, too, although it did not call for forte.
Then methought the air grew denser
Perfumed by an unseen censer
Swung by seraphim whose footfall
Tinkled on the tufted floor—
It was a woman’s voice, her recitation crackling as if filtered through an old radio or gramophone. I could place the poem from its obvious rhythm, although at first I didn’t recognize the words: a later verse of Poe’s “The Raven.” The voice mail was forty-five seconds long, cutting out mid-nevermore.
I wasn’t sure what to make of it. But then a notification popped up from my What-to-Expect message board.
MichaelStrange: After this program I received a call from a neighbor of Poe’s who lived just opposite his cottage at Fordham, saying, “If only Edgar could have heard you, you’ve practically spoken for him.”
“Why,” I whispered, “are you telling me this?” No answer, no movement, no whir of the fan, no glossy stickers sashaying to the floor. I turned the phone facedown on the carpet. I walked to the door and sat against it.
Michael wasn’t haunting our condo—a 2012 remodel without creaking floorboards or mysterious paneling, just a building in a line of buildings, its only noteworthy quality a locked turquoise door. She wasn’t haunting me—I had spent weeks alone in the condo, I had spent months alone in our apartment in New York, I had spent years alone, decades. I sat with my back to the inside door of Linda’s craft room, watching my daughter sleep. Thinking. Calculating.
I knew little about séances, or exorcisms. I hadn’t even seen The Exorcist, the film, just knew the scene where the little girl’s head started spinning, where she talked in a comically low voice and spat bile. Clara’s wouldn’t be that sort of exorcism. Clar
a wasn’t possessed. She wasn’t anybody’s puppet. It was more like she’d been overrun. It was like when I’d gotten bedbugs—I hadn’t realized they were there, but once I did realize, I could leave. I could take action. Call the pest management company to fumigate. Seal all my good clothes into plastic bags and wait until everything was dead. Demand back my down payment and first month’s rent. Find a different place to live.
I WENT BACK upstairs to say goodnight to Linda and Seth, to tell Ben I was going to bed. They were already cleaning, tying trash bags, lining wineglasses up next to the sink. I thanked Linda for dinner, faked a yawn, and then went down and got in bed with my clothes on. I knew Ben wouldn’t notice. When he came to lie down next to me, I pretended to be sleeping, breathing heavily until I heard him breathing heavily.
Once the house was quiet, I went back into the craft room. Clara was lying there with her eyes open, gumming a finger. I put her on the floor while I folded up the pack ’n’ play and tossed her diapers and creams and the rest into my own overnight bag, grateful we’d left most of her things in the trunk. I didn’t want to leave her alone in the craft room, so I brought her up and lay her on the living room carpet while I wrestled her stuff up the stairs and out to the car. The front door beeped each time I opened it, but in their whiskey stupors, no one noticed.
Part III
If only somewhere there was a way to sustain this dream—the only reality I have ever known.
—Margaret Wise Brown, in a letter to Michael Strange, October 1947
17
I stopped at home to get my laptop, which was charging on the kitchen table. Solly whined while I fed Clara, but I didn’t let her out of her crate—the dog walker had come that night and would come again in the morning. I took a few extra pairs of socks and underwear, a few half-filled notebooks. Some tinfoil-wrapped brownies to snack on while driving so I wouldn’t fall asleep.