Heike suppressed an urge to turn and look behind her and pushed the door back into place. The magnetic latch clicked. She stayed there, her fingertips against the cool porcelain of the cabinet knob.
— Now, she said. Now you can give him back. She spoke quietly at first, and then called out loud, giving the cupboard door an extra shake: I brought you your trinket. Now you can give me my son.
There was no movement in the room. No sudden tugging at her waist, no small arm wrapped around her leg. No chiming child’s voice, calling to her from the hallway.
Of course there wasn’t. The thought came to her all at once: how ridiculous. A silly pilgrimage. The idea of it embarrassed her. This realization like a sudden wake-up, a kick to the ear, her stomach dropping.
Then, almost a howl:
— Daniel! Give him back to me! Give him back!
Her voice filled the cavern of the house but did not echo. It sucked away into the walls. In the cupboard, the little figurine smiled at some unknown, distant point. Faithless. Hard behind hard glass. Heike let her shoulders drop. Outside, the sun moved into a bank of clouds or sank below the tree line, and the light in the cabin fell. A thin stream of cold air moved past her; she felt it against her neck, lifting her hair, and she shivered slightly and looked to the door, expecting to find it ajar in the breeze, but it had not moved and rested inside its frame where she had leaned against it. A window somewhere, then. Warped through the years of wind and rain, some crack in the frame that allowed the weather in. She wrapped her arms around herself for warmth. No sense staying here any longer. She bent to gather up her bag.
There was the smallest of sounds from behind her: the quick patter of a mouse. A start, and then a stop. Heike lifted her head. A moment of quiet, a three-count, and then she heard it again. Not far away, scuttling against the wood floor. She turned.
The sound had come from the opposite side of the room. Louder now: something bigger than a mouse, surely. She could hear it, running along the baseboard. The thing must have followed her into the house, come in with her when she’d opened the door. Heike peered into the grey corner. A squirrel? She’d once seen an opossum, dead on the highway, its weird white belly and long pink tail splayed out, but it was true that they also had sharp teeth. Where the wall met the floor, the light failed and made a dark corridor. She followed it beyond the boundary of the kitchen, edging her way through to where the house opened up, the bedroom door standing wide. The sound came again, this time over to her left.
A scrabbling. She was still, listening, then quickly stepped into the bedroom after it. The braided rug felt almost greasy with dust under her feet, and she used it to wipe away the grit she’d picked up coming down the ridge. She had a knot high in her stomach and one at the base of her skull. The room was silent.
— Who’s there?
The words were out of her mouth before she’d had a chance to think them, and she almost laughed but it came out stilted, a stifled breath. Her hands were shaking. She went to the closet and yanked it open, the accordion door squealing on its hinges. A few empty wire hangers jangled against each other helplessly with the sudden draft. There was a shimmer of white: a nightgown left dangling from a hook.
Nothing. A bit of foolishness, but her head buzzed with it.
She pulled the folding door closed again, the hinges sticking, and as she did so she felt the same current come through the place, cool and cellar-damp against her shoulders and the backs of her arms. There was a long, slow creak: the bedroom door swung shut with a bang.
Heike laid a hand on the doorknob to open the door again, but found it was now somehow locked. She rattled the knob and then pulled at it with both hands.
— Hey! Who’s there? Hey, let me out!
The futility of hearing herself call out loud in an empty house frustrated her even more. She turned slowly and pressed her back against the door, the knob tight against her spine. There was nothing in the room with her. The noise had stopped; the animal, whatever it was, must have run out, somehow bumping the door as it went. She wished now that she’d asked Arden to come with her, but Arden would by now be long gone, back home to greet her husband as he got off the train from the city. Heike crossed the room to take a better look at the window. She’d have to jimmy it open and jump out into the high grass. She began to work at the metal latch. The moving parts had been painted over.
The pattering came again, just behind her. This was a surprise. She half-turned her head; she’d thought the thing gone, out on the other side of the door, but now it seemed to be in the room with her after all. It crossed from one side to the other. Then back again, faster, it seemed, this time. The sound of it was difficult to place. Many-legged. Something feather-light brushed her calves.
She spun around and caught the flit of a shadow disappearing under the bed. Out of the corner of her eye. Then from the bed to the corner of the room. Some dark little figure, low to the ground.
The light failing outside, her eyes adjusting, playing tricks.
Almost a flicker. Always just out of her frame of vision. Heike pushed away the thought of her own nervousness outside the cabin, the presence of the girl there, watching, her wide stare concealed in the trees. The girl seemed to be there always, close by. Even in Dolan’s house, a breath leading Heike down the hall. A hand pulling at her. She shoved hard at the window and it gave, sliding to her left, but only a few inches. The air outside was fresh with mist, and she gasped at it. The opening too small for her to squeeze through, but perhaps just wide enough to let the thing escape.
She lifted the coverlet and folded it over and sat down on the corner of the bed, the sheet underneath protected and clean and plain white. Her back straight, her fingertips against the mattress, but only lightly. A compulsion to draw her feet up onto the bed with her, off the floor. She talked herself out of it. She was being foolish and had locked herself into a strange room with something that belonged outside, in the wild. A steady, rhythmic scratching now.
Just some little animal. It didn’t want to be in the house any more than she did; it wanted to be out in the forest. The scratching sounded almost deliberate. Digging, Heike thought. Except slower, more thoughtful. She remembered Paulsen’s red-haired girl, the itch of a million ants crawling over her. The sound a kind of irritation in Heike’s mind, and an image came to her: a black insect, long as your hand, carving out its burrow. Its mouthparts working like shiny knives.
A child’s sharp fingernail, etching her own image deep into the plaster of the wall.
She blinked hard. Of course not. Stupid. It was digging. It was just an animal, trying to get out. A raccoon. All those sweet photographs in the nature magazines, their masked eyes and hand-washing. Although it struck her that a raccoon might not move so quickly. She gave her head a shake to loosen up her neck. She shook out her hands.
This animal’s pattering rush. Almost a flutter. A jay, then, or even a small owl, especially if its wing were broken. An injured thing. She waited, listening, it seemed to her, for its breath. The sound came again, a rasping, from behind the highboy.
Enough. Heike got up to push the dresser away from the wall.
It was a heavy piece, and she braced against one side of it to try to swing it out in an arc. The animal behind it, whatever it was, picked up urgency, scratching away. Maybe it was trapped. It occurred to Heike that it would be easier to move the dresser without the weight of its drawers. She took hold of the middle section and pulled. The drawer stuck and then jerked out into her hands. It was filled not, as she had imagined, with moth-holed clothing, but with bed linens, still almost crisply folded, and on the other side of the drawer, only a few scattered papers. She drew it out slowly, taking the weight of it onto her legs, and set it down on the floor next to the bed. She reached in to neaten the little pile and found the paper had gone soft as cloth over time. In a corner of the drawer, there was the sticky white residue of an ancient egg sac. She pushed the papers to cover it, and they slipped against e
ach other, the top one flipping in her hand. A child’s drawing, the colours faded: a scatter of letter m’s, bird wings in a sunny sky. Heike recoiled and dropped the paper. Hadn’t Tessa’s drawing also been of such a sky, such birds? The page soaking through and the girl diving down to retrieve it.
Behind the dresser, the scratching went dead. Heike looked back toward the door. The silence was not quite a relief.
She stood up and took hold of the dresser again but found she was nervous of her feet, her legs, where her body met the ground. The highboy was wedged in tight, but this time she felt it budge, and she could hear the animal become anxious again, the scrabbling spiking as though the thing were running up and down, up and down, along the wall. Was it afraid of her? She braced for one last shove, and the dresser gave with a long scraping noise, sweeping out from the corner, the remaining drawers pitching forward and the top one shooting out and hitting the floor.
Suddenly the sound came from everywhere at once: the thing scrambling over her feet, scratching up the walls on either side of her, above her, the rush of its wings in her hair. She covered her head with her arms and screamed, trying to spin away from it, but it was all around her. There was a high-pitched whistle, a shriek that might have been her own voice; she didn’t know. She could feel the prick of its nails in her skin, against her thighs and the back of her neck. Dizzy, she rocked back and banged hard against the closet door, grabbing at the handle for balance, the accordion squealing open. The noise of it echoed off the walls.
Heike found herself on top of the bed, folded over, her arms protecting her head. The room swirled with dust. She came up slowly onto her knees, hands clasped behind her head, her elbows drawn in tight against her face. The folding doors to the closet still trembled from where she’d fallen against them. Her pulse surged in her ears.
Gone as instantly as it had appeared. Heike herself the only thing moving.
No. Daylight filtered in through the window and cast a dull ray through the dust. She could see it drifting slowly down, down, back into place. Pinpricks. This listless movement adding to the still. She let her hands come down to rest on her knees, breathing out. It was almost a sob. She had not realized she’d been holding her breath. Through the window there was the high, piercing trill of a toad, and Heike flinched.
Outside, the leaves lifted in the trees; the air seemed warmer. From the next room she heard the low groan of the front door to the cabin and its subtle thud-thud-thud, the broken latch bumping against the frame.
There was a residual tingle left on her skin, and she fought the urge to grate at herself with her own fingernails, the prickle on her scalp almost unbearable. She got up instead and tried the door, pressing hard enough on the set screw for it to leave an impression in her thumb. The knob that had refused to turn in her hands now twisted smoothly; the slim creak of the bedroom door as it opened, the difference between a locked door and a jammed one. Heike put a hand to her forehead as though checking herself for illness, a fever, and then squeezed her temples. There was a little stool in the corner of the room, and she dragged it over and wedged it against the door to prop it open. Nothing now behind the dresser, the drawers splayed over the floor at the foot of the bed.
She hefted the first drawer she’d removed, the linens inside it sliding with a graduated thunk to one side, and fit it neatly into the middle of the highboy, then the top drawer. The bottom drawer had not fallen completely out, and she tapped it into place with her foot before sliding the dresser back against the wall. An impulse to leave everything the way the house wanted it, as though she were its maid.
The closet door stood open on one side where she’d fallen against it, and she scrabbled her own fingernails against the frame, as a test, then recoiled a little at the noise despite herself. She fingered the nightgown, the empty hangers. A few cotton dresses hanging to one side, a dark crinoline on a hook at the very back. As she went to pull the door shut, something caught her eye. She was looking up into the closet, at the shelf over the rod. The Dresden doll smiled down at her.
Heike stepped back. She’d put the figurine back where it belonged in the kitchen. Hadn’t she?
She raised a tentative hand and took it down, the tips of her fingers also bumping against some other thing up on the shelf. A soft-covered sketchbook, what the doll had been standing on. She rippled the edges of the book with a thumb and tucked it under her arm, then passed through the door to the main part of the cabin, back to the kitchen.
The little figurine cut into her hand. She let her eyes drift around the room, unable for a moment to look at the cabinet. Unable somehow to get her breath. She thought again of Paulsen’s red-headed girlfriend; Arden’s theory that Heike hadn’t shed the effects of the drugs. Seeing things. But she was sure she’d put it back.
She looked up. Behind the milky glass, an identical china figurine stood politely, her apron held in the tips of her fingers. Heike let her arm drop, her own fingers still wrapped around the second doll. All of its gravitas had disappeared; it was weightless in her grip now, and she approached the kitchen cabinet sidelong, as you would a stray dog, cautious and curious all at once, and brought the figurine in her hand back up to eye level for a better look.
They were not quite the same. The pattern of the skirt, a fleur-de-lis, was a little more stylized on the original doll; her shoes a softer pink; her buckles fine and narrow where on the new figurine (as she thought of it), the buckles were squat. She turned it over and found no double sword, no Meissen stamp. The one a copy of the other. A curiosity. She peered through the glass, childishly unwilling to open the cabinet and move the figurine again. The face on the doll in her hands was just as delicately rendered. She turned her back to the cabinet and held the new doll to her chest, her face to the window.
The pond greying in grey light. A soft breath ran through the trees now and along the water, its surface rippling like a skein of old silk.
She had not thought of the place as lonely when she first found it.
* * *
She had not wanted to go back into the bedroom but found herself wandering through anyway, checking the dresser, the closet, arranging the bedspread neatly. Not quite able to bear leaving without replacing the replica figurine. In the closet she methodically untangled the hangers and set the replica in its place, then suddenly remembered the book, still tucked against her side with one elbow.
She turned it over in her hands. It surprised her; she had lost track of it there, immediately used to the feel of it close against her ribs.
The shush of her thumb against the paper. The book filled with drawings. Not the work of a child this time, but sketches of the woods and the water. A window that looked familiar, set high, near to the corner of a house with a winding morning glory vine coiled at its base. The front door with its window box: drawings of this house, then. The pond, its horseshoe shape unmistakable, snapdragons at the water’s edge, the wood-plank raft, lead grey and hidden in the high reeds.
And then the little house itself, or some little house; a path leading to it, a girl. A doe; a hunter’s quiver full upon his back. The watercolour head of a bird, lying nestled in a bed of wildflowers, and then a full page of birds, page after page: black birds descending madly from the air and down upon a body. The body coming apart as easily as if it were made of straw.
The artist working up a study, eight, ten pages’ worth. Heike flipped to the front of the book and back again, and to the front, the movement of the pages causing the birds to move: diving and disappearing and diving again. On the inside front cover, in black ink, just a number: 06.1950
— Anyone’s story.
She said this out loud, quickly, shutting the book, reaching it high onto the shelf where it had come from. She set the figurine back on top of it and paused, her hand resting for a moment on top of her head.
There are so many stories about ravens. A fable. A fairy tale. Perhaps she hadn’t made it up, after all: this story one she’d been told over and over
again in childhood, her mother doing the telling, and her mother’s mother. Just another thing she could not remember remembering.
She reached up and moved the figurine to one side. The book just sitting there, up on its shelf.
Heike took it down again.
* * *
The first half mile of trail was the darkest—down to the mouth of the stream, where it burbled into Cayuga. As she got closer, she knew she’d hear the sound of it, the water braiding itself around the rocks. She snaked along the ridge, Eric’s book in her purse, strapped now like a postman’s bag tight across her chest, and the new sketchbook in there, too, both spines slapping heavy at her ribs. There was a spitting rain, but it was not cold.
Either Eric would be home or he wouldn’t be. Heike tried to steel herself for the negotiation. Best to let him think she was coming back, to appear contrite, allow him the upper hand: a snide reveal of Daniel’s hiding place or, better, a dismissal. Perhaps he’d had enough by now, would send them packing—Heike and Daniel together—out into the night.
The sun was not completely gone. If it had not also been raining, she would have been able to follow the light, moving west; as it was, she kept on steadily, her arms a little raised to guard against branches, and held the quiet lap of the water to her right. The air was warm and a mosquito dogged her, landing again and again behind her ear. She thought of the girl, Tessa, as she had when she was standing just outside the cabin, but the shadows were deeper now, and her image, the wisp of her hair, receded farther into the trees. The little house back behind her, alone and somehow broken, stripped away.
Where the woods descended into stillness, Heike stopped, waiting for any splash, a notion that the stream was still there. She could not see but imagined the dragonflies at their evening dance along the surface. The trees black around her—not a watercolour black but made of something thick, unguent, something you could put your hand into. She’d swallowed her heart and it was choking her. No sound but the buzz of some larger thing at her face, a horsefly, and it drowned everything else out.
I Remember You Page 26