The Guest Book

by Sarah Blake

  It was an absurdity. An affectation. Unreal. And yet summer wasn’t summer without it. The year could not turn without time on the Island.

  At the end of the block ahead of her, the shade of the trees in the tiny triangle park had tipped into evening and the promise of the cool to come. Three black men sat on the single bench, legs stretched out, shirts hanging loose around their sweating chests. One of them smoked and watched her approach, watching without any interest, without any movement toward her—a white woman in her middle age, neither young nor pretty, simply walking.

  She stared at him through her dark glasses, walking toward him down the block, and after a little bit, he looked away. She had seen him before, sitting there, and she had that sense—as she often did in the city—of the many layers of all of them, familiar strangers, sliding along the surface of each other’s lives, visible and invisible, like fish in a clear pond. The door to her building clicked open and she passed into the cool marble silence, the sounds of the city muffled as the street door swung shut behind her. Years ago, when she and Paul had first moved into the apartment, she’d lie through the long, airless midsummer nights with the windows flung wide open for a breeze, hovering between sleep and waking, the voices of the people in the park outside coming to her like radio broadcasts from another world, comforting and incomprehensible—human noises in the dark.

  She pushed open the front door into the long hall that tunneled the length of the apartment to her grandmother’s oval gilt mirror hanging squarely at the end. Far down the hall she heard the clicking of Seth’s keyboard.

  The typing stopped. “Mom?”

  “Hey, love,” Evie answered automatically, staring at a letter marked Special Delivery that lay on the mat under her feet.

  After a minute, the typing started up again.

  She picked it up. It was on expensive stationery, and the handwriting—handwriting!—in indigo ink. Miss Evelyn Ludlow Milton. For an instant, her own name looked to her like someone else’s, which of course it was. It was her aunt’s name and her great-aunt’s, and her great-great-aunt’s. With a slight dread, she turned the envelope over and ripped it open. Addressed to herself and her four cousins, it read: You are respectfully reminded of the meeting arranged in the offices of Sherman, Troup, and DeForest on Friday, June 29.

  It was six months to the day her mother had died. And it was next Monday. They were being gathered to discuss what was next. She slid out of her shoes, pulling her satchel over her head, and threw her keys onto the table, where they clattered off the old wood before sliding down onto the carpet with a thunk. And what was next? She doubted she and Paul could afford it, and if they had to pay for it, she was pretty sure Paul would want out. And then what? It wasn’t just the Island, it was all of them—it was Mum.

  Wandering down the hallway with the letter in hand, the woman walking toward her in the mirror looked exactly like Granny K. Her eye rested on the Polaroid tucked in the frame of the mirror; she reached and slid it free.

  There on a sunny afternoon stood Moss, Joan, and Evelyn Milton in front of the Big House on Crockett’s Island.

  Moss stood slightly to one side, his short dark hair blown loose, his right fist raised in a salute of some kind, a grin on his face that seemed to be the end of a joke someone must just have told. He looked to be somewhere in his twenties. He wore a madras jacket over an untucked white shirt, cupped a cigarette in his left hand, and looked straight at the camera, as if daring it.

  Beside him, long limbed, in their twenties, their brown hair cut attractively short, Joan and Evelyn Milton stared serenely into their future, their arms wrapped lightly around each other’s waist, the familiar line of windows at the front of the house framing their heads. In narrow shorts and button-down sleeveless blouses, fine boned and easy, they stood beside each other, clearly linked. Sisters. The Milton girls. The girls who were raised to say yes. Yes to their parents, yes to a world of parties and dances and green hopes at the far end of the lawn.

  Mum.

  Evie looked into Joan’s smile—into that laughing, open trust in all that was ahead. Evie had never seen this expression on her mother’s face. Not ever. The woman she knew had been nothing at all like this girl.

  Of silence, her mother had been the master, entering rooms as carefully as if each one held a bomb, hesitating on the threshold, moving quietly inside a conversation, quietly out. And Evie had spent most of her teenage years in a state of barely suppressed fury, ready to erupt at the simplest provocation, living a heady mix of righteousness and outrage, determined to explode every bomb she could. She vowed to be nothing like her mother. Her life had been wrong, somehow, a life lived in the slipped track, as though the right reel of film had never caught on the teeth of the projector and the life she and her father lived was just off—almost right. Evie couldn’t say why she felt this; her mother and father dressed the way everyone else did, ate the same food, Evie had gone to the same schools. It was as if her parents had inherited their days rather than chosen them, made do with what they had, and so they peopled the rooms rather than lived in them, ghosting their own lives.

  But here, the tilt of her mother’s chin, the open smile, showed a young woman straining forward, delighted. Fresh. A woman alive and expectant as a summer morning. The kind of character some novels of a certain type began with. Bright, alert, emerging onto the white stoop of a lovely house at the start of a day. What a lark! What a plunge!

  What happened?

  Written on the bottom of the picture in her mother’s careful print was the date, August 22, 1959, the morning of—punctuated with two exclamation points.

  Of what, Mum? Evie had asked.

  Oh? Her mother’s face was vague. I can’t remember.

  It was nobody’s birthday or anniversary. As far as Evie had ever been able to figure, it was nothing remarkable at all. A summer day at the end of the fifties on the Island.

  But it had been this very photograph her mother asked for in the winter as she lay dying. It had been her sister whom Joan had called for, though Evelyn had died a year before—and died in a punishing silence, refusing to speak to Joan at the end. Evie had never known the sisters to have had a breach. But in her last days it was as though Evelyn had been possessed by a spite that seemed to gather her high-handedness into one furious ball, against which Joan had batted on her own deathbed, calling for her sister over and over as she died. And the sorrow that that had caused, the inexplicable meanness of it all, erupted in moments like this when Evie would find herself studying the two of them gazing serenely toward their future.

  “Mom?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” Her son’s voice drifted back into his room. “I found them.”

  She slipped the Polaroid back into the frame.

  She hadn’t seen her cousins since the funeral. Mum’s will had gone through probate. By now the cousins were meant to have a plan. Instead, they had fallen into a shared paralysis undercut by an unspoken but persistent campaign on the part of her cousin Henry, the eldest of “the Evelyns,” as they were called, to assert his natural right—natural, as he saw it—to run the Island, because his mother had always taken charge. Aunt E had run the roost. Evie could weigh in, but Evie was not an Evelyn, she was “a Joan.” There were four of them and one of her, and after all, Henry would point out over and over, Aunt Joan had been lovely, but for most of her life she had never taken charge up there. And though she never liked to agree with anything her cousin Henry said, he was right. Her mother had never insisted on anything except that nothing change.

  Never, that is, until the week before she died, when Evie had come into her mother’s room and found her sitting up in bed with this photograph in her hand.

  “I want to be buried on Crockett’s,” Joan said, and turned to look at her daughter.

  “All right,” Evie answered, her voice sticking in her throat. It was the first time either of them had talked directly about the fact that her mother was dying.<
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  “At the edge of the picnic grounds.”

  Evie put down the tray on the bed.

  “And the stone should say ‘Here.’”

  “‘Here’?” Evie was bewildered. “Not ‘Joan Milton—’”

  “‘Here,’” her mother repeated. “One word.”

  “Okay,” Evie managed. “Why?”

  Joan had turned on her pillow and looked at her daughter intently, considering her—as if, Evie realized, she couldn’t be sure of her.

  “But I told you that. I told you that already.”

  What had she told her? Evie wondered. When?

  “Promise me, Evie.”

  “I do,” Evie said. “I will, Mum.”

  “Evelyn won’t like it,” she said.

  “Aunt Evelyn is dead, Mum,” Evie said gently.

  And Joan had nodded, leaned the photograph up against the lamp on her bedside table, folded her hands across the faded silk coverlet over her chest, and closed her eyes.

  It had seemed easy just then to say, I do, I will. It had seemed simple, and easy, and right. But nothing at all now was simple, or easy, or right.

  * * *

  “MOM?”

  “Lordy!” She was sharper than she meant. “Seth, could you come out here and talk to me, instead of yelling the entire length of Bleecker Street?”

  Her son emerged from the doorway of his room, six feet tall, the knapsack with his name stitched on it that he had had since fifth grade slung over one broad shoulder, and she smiled. He smiled back, the fifteen-year-old in full possession of his beauty and his charm, the boy still shining through the man’s body.

  “I’ve got to go to the library.”

  She nodded. “Do you have money?”

  “Yup,” he said. “Later.”

  She leaned back in her chair.

  “As in, see you,” he said.

  “I am familiar with the phrase.”

  “Okay.” He slid around the door. “And it’s not the entire length of Bleecker, anyway.”

  “Wait,” she called after him, smiling. “I’ll drive you.”

  He backed up and peeked his head in with a surprised grin on his face that was all Paul’s. “You will?”

  She nodded. “Hold up.”

  He took the flights of stairs at a run, his sneakers making that single, sharp, high-pitch shriek against the linoleum that always reminded her of gym class and whistles.

  “Hey, Mom, do you know what Dr. Conklin told us yesterday?” He waited for her at the bottom.

  “What.”

  “All the major questions have been answered in physics,” Seth said cheerfully, and pulled open the front door.

  She looked at him. “That’s horrible.”

  “It’s progress.”

  “What does that mean for physics?”

  “It means I don’t need to take it, right? I mean, seriously, why would I take physics when it’s all over?”

  “Hardly all over.”

  “It is, though, Mom.” He grinned. “And anyway, I can use the free period for homework. And then I’d have more time to study Russian, and then I’d be able to say I speak two really hard languages.”

  And then, she thought, looking at him. The car was parked haphazardly at the end of the block, evidence of her distraction. And then—stretching out into a vast, leafy life. First one thing, then the next. She slid behind the wheel. Every day something will happen, something new will come. And then, and then. She remembered this urgent push toward the next thing and the next. She pulled into traffic, joining the line that snaked toward the corner. It was all going forward toward some unknown, wonderful end.

  The light turned green and Evie waited, her hand on the gear stick, for an older woman to cross. A woman in a skirt and jacket, her groceries clutched in one hand. Evie wasn’t paying attention at first; she was calculating when she could nudge forward and make the turn without scaring the woman or being rude. In the passenger seat, Seth stared ahead. The woman stepped off the curb, her eyes on the walk sign, crossing very slowly, determined to make it in the one go of the light, determined to keep moving forward though Evie could see the effort it cost her. In her living room, Evie imagined, there might be a chair, a stopping point, to take a little rest. Whereas Minetta Lane, all thirty feet of it, was a vast distance to be crossed before the light turned again.

  “So brave,” Evie murmured.

  Seth glanced at her.

  “It takes so much courage to keep getting up and going into the world when you are old or sick.”

  “I know, Mom.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I know, Mom,” Seth said again gently. “You’ve said.”

  Evie’s eyes filled. “I have?” And sitting there, waiting, her boy beside her, it came to her that this woman in front of her was moving the way her mother moved in the last year of her life, before they’d understood it was cancer that had twined around her bones and was pulling her backward, slowing her down.

  He nodded. The car behind them honked. The woman was almost at the halfway point, though not yet. Go, Evie heard herself whisper. Go on. It was unbearable. How old was she? Maybe not old. Maybe just sick. And where was her family? The car behind honked again.

  “Mom!”

  Evie had opened her door and was out on the street, moving toward the woman and reaching a hand to take her groceries, without thinking, without paying attention to the driver behind her, leaning on his horn now.

  The woman was much older than Evie had thought, and stopped, her gaze drawn to Evie. The driver called out his window. “Hey!”

  “Can I take those for you?” Evie pointed to the bags.

  The woman looked down and handed them to Evie without a word. If she could have, Evie would have picked the woman up too and carried her the rest of the way, nearly frantic with wanting to move her, to get her to safety.

  “Let me help.” She offered her arm.

  And slowly, the woman took it. And Evie turned toward her and they walked the last ten feet, slowly, the bag of groceries in one hand. She took in the fact that her car door was wide open in the street, that Seth was turned in his seat looking at the driver in the car behind, who was shouting something. She saw and heard and concentrated on getting this woman across.

  They made it up onto the curb. “Thank you, dear.” The woman pointed to her groceries. “Very nice of you.”

  Evie nodded and hurried back to the car. She had never once done anything like that for her own mother, never. She slid into the driver’s seat, slammed the door, and put the car in gear, driving away, forward, passing the woman on the curb, now waiting to cross Sixth Avenue.

  “Mom?”

  “It’s all right, Seth,” Evie said. And then she simply started to cry. He sat stiffly beside her. They pulled through the traffic up Sixth Avenue, in the stream of cars heading north, in silence. Her mother dead but not yet buried. Her son looking straight ahead, the tears sliding down her cheeks.

  “Oh,” she sniffed. The woman had been nothing at all like her mother, not in shape or size. Nothing, except for that nearly childlike concentration as she crossed the street, the will to get where she was going, no matter what. Nobody warned you about this stuff. Nobody said, Watch out for the echoes. Watch out for the ghosts.

  “Mom,” Seth said. “It’s okay.”

  She nodded and tried to smile. At the library entrance, Seth slid out of the car, bounded up the stone stairs, and turned quickly to find her before she drove away. Their eyes met through the window, and he waved.

  She nodded again at him and did smile. And watched as he climbed the rest of the stairs, yanked open the heavy doors, and disappeared inside. The wind rustled through the leaves in the two old maples that stood like sentinels on either side.

  Six months ago there were leaves still hanging on in winter, different leaves on the same trees. Her mother’s cancer had been vicious and implacable. An enemy with too much firepower sent in to topple such a soft target.
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  Never mind.

  “She’ll sleep more and more, and then one day she’ll just stop drinking, and that’s when you know she’s decided to die.”

  Evie had nodded at the hospice nurse, not wanting to be rude, but it seemed to her an absurd bit of wishfulness that the dying would come to terms with death so neatly. Out the window, the afternoon was closing down and the winter dark rising in the park across the way while her mother grew pale and paler inside, the sheets pulled straight around her in long white lawns. Snow on snow, so quietly—as she had gone about everything in her life, until her last morning, when she had woken up, her eyes wide with fright.

  “Evie,” she’d whispered, “am I dying? I dreamed I was dying.”

  “It’s all right, Mum,” Evie had said, looking straight at her. “You’re right here.”

  No matter how well you take care of the dying, no matter if you sit beside them every minute, every day—in the end they must go, and you stay. And you wave them off. You lie.

  Ten

  THE HOUSE NEEDED PAINT. The shutters needed slats. The granite slabs that stood in for front steps were fuzzed with moss. But the bees droned in the lilac by the front door, and shafts of irises gone to seed waved in clumps along the low line beneath the windows.

  Ogden rapped upon the wood and then leaned toward the door to listen.

  “Come on,” he said, and pushed down the latch, and they followed him into the empty front hallway.

  “Hello!” Ogden called. Kitty put her hand on the banister of the painted gray staircase that stretched steeply up to the second floor. “Mr. Crockett?”

  No one answered. Whoever had lived here had left long ago. In the front sitting room the wallpaper tattered over the windows and dead flies spotted the sills. Four heavy wooden chairs occupied each corner, the stuffing leaking, stalwarts in decline. A braided rug wound its circle in the middle in faded grays and greens. They walked through into the dining room, where a long oaken table stood at its center. No chairs surrounded it, no rug supported it; the massive table seemed to Kitty abandoned. Out the side windows the timothy grasses waved high from the wide field. There was a door to a back hall, a door to the front hall, a door to what looked like a pantry, and then another door off its hinges that showed the bottom of a flight of back stairs.