The Lace Reader

by Brunonia Barry

  “There,” he said. Starting to get up. He realized that it was a trick question. She knew he was watching her. She’d probably known it all along.

  She grabbed the mooring in one pass.

  They sat in silence for a minute. “Thanks for sailing us in,” he said finally.

  “No problem,” she said.

  He had no idea what else to say to her. He reached over and grabbed the horn. Gave it three quick blasts to summon the launch.

  They sat another minute, neither of them speaking. Then he heard the sound of the launch as it was approaching.

  “How’s your head?” she asked.

  “Hurts like a son of a bitch.” He tried to laugh.

  “Poor baby,” she said.

  He didn’t know if she meant it or if she was making fun of him.

  “Are you okay to drive?” she asked as he held the passenger door to let her in.

  “I’m okay,” he said.

  He took her to the house. He walked her to the door.

  “I’d invite you in, but…”

  Rafferty put up a hand. “I’ve got to get home,” he said, gesturing at his head. He was disappointed as hell, but there was nothing he could do about it.

  She nodded. “I hope you feel better,” she said.

  “Twenty-four hours,” he said. “Or a good night’s sleep. Whichever comes first.”

  He started down the steps. Halfway down he turned around. He walked back.

  “I need to tell you to lock your door,” he said.

  “What?”

  He was standing too close. It made him dizzy trying to look at her this close. And it scared her a little; he could tell it did. He stepped back down a stair. “Cal is going to try to see you. Sometime. I’m not trying to scare you. I’m just telling you to keep your door locked.”

  “Okay,” she said. Her voice cracked slightly when she said it.

  “I’m not trying to scare you,” he said again.

  “Okay,” she repeated.

  Rafferty waited on the step until she was inside and he heard the click of the lock.

  He wondered if he had any Imitrex left. This was going to be a bad one.

  It is important to ask the right question of the lace. This may be the Reader’s greatest responsibility.

  —THE LACE READER’S GUIDE

  Chapter 19

  I LEAN AGAINST THE DOOR to steady myself, waiting for the rush of adrenaline to fade. Rafferty wasn’t trying to scare me, but he did. I know he’s right. Cal will try to see me. I’ve seen it in my dreams a thousand times. My nightmares. I know how it will go. The scene has played through me so often that it seems almost rehearsed.

  It may not freak me out anymore, not on a daily basis anyway, but it’s a bad place for me to go.

  I’m not all that disappointed that our evening ended early. Though I feel bad that Rafferty has a headache, the truth is that I’m not feeling all that great myself. I can’t tell if it’s physical or psychological, but I make a mental note to call my surgeon in L.A. and have him set up some kind of postsurgical follow-up with someone in Boston.

  It takes me a few minutes to realize that I’ve left Eva’s sweater in Rafferty’s car. I hear the sound of the engine starting as I race down the steps. By the time I reach the brick walkway, the cruiser is rounding the corner.

  I climb back up the front steps and turn the handle of the front door. It spins but doesn’t engage. The door is locked. I can see the key on the front table where I dropped it.

  I could pick the lock. It’s an easy one. All I need is a hairpin, something wiry. I look around the porch for something, anything. But it’s too dark, a moonless night, and the porch is trellised and ivy-covered. I’m too tired to spend a lot of time looking. If I’m going to have to break in again, I figure I should walk around back to the window I’ve already broken. Why add another window repair to the Realtor’s list?

  The iron gate of the garden creaks open. I close it behind me and step into the formal gardens. My footsteps crunch on the pea stones and crushed shells of the path to the back door.

  I am halfway across the garden when I feel his presence. It jumps down on me like a cat into a baby’s crib. It is thick and oppressive, and it steals my breath.

  I reel around.

  The figure of a man sits motionless on the bench. Hunched over. Illuminated by the reflection of the streetlights through the barred iron fence. Only the eyes are moving. I can feel them on me as I walk.

  My legs are nightmare heavy. I am stuck.

  Rafferty’s warning comes back at me. Cal is going to try to see you.

  I can hear him breathing.

  I cannot move.

  I close my eyes and try to summon the dogs. In the nightmare—or the hallucination, as my doctors insisted on calling it—there were dogs. But my nightmare takes place on Yellow Dog Island, not here in Eva’s garden. There are no dogs here to help me.

  For the first time in my life, I hope I’m having a hallucination. I close my eyes. When I open them, he will not be there.

  Slowly, so slowly, I open my eyes. He is still there. This is real.

  “What do you want?” I try to growl the words.

  His eyes burn into me. I have been here before.

  “Go away,” I say. But the growl is gone, and my voice sounds thin, tinny. I have already lost.

  The world stops. We are suspended. When I finally hear the voice, it shocks me.

  “Sophya,” his voice says. It is barely a whisper.

  I am surfacing through water. I am being pulled out of something dark. I can breathe.

  “Jack,” I say.

  My eyes clear, or adjust to the darkness, and I see him for the first time. My childhood love. Inside, a few minutes later, under the harsh electric light, I will see the years on him. The anger. The betrayal. But here, lit only by moon and stars, he is eighteen again.

  The beginning Reader must resist the urge to interpret the images seen. These images belong entirely to the Seeker.

  —THE LACE READER’S GUIDE

  Chapter 20

  I AWAKEN IN A SAILING SHIP. Floating on open ocean with no land in sight. My skin cracked open from sun. Tongue thick with dehydration. I am dying.

  I try to clear my head. I have been here before, dreamed it at least.

  I force myself to sit up.

  What is real?

  Force of will clears my head.

  What is real?

  I am in a room. Eva’s room. I have been staring up through the lace of the canopy. I jerk my head away, and my vision fades, leaving traces along the walls as it disappears.

  What is real?

  Eva’s bed sits dead center in the room, a sailing vessel surrounded by open ocean. Its four carved posts lift upward like the spires of a miniature cathedral. The mahogany was brought back as ballast on one of the Whitney ships that traveled the Madagascar run. It was then carved by a Salem mast maker who was more aspiring artist than shipwright. The headboard is rough-hewn, but as the posts ascend, they curve and twist in symmetrical perfection, lifting to the billowing canopy, which Eva fashioned from rounds of bobbin lace she made over the years, then patched together into a crazy quilt of lace. The bed hovers somewhere between cathedral and sailing ship, but more of the latter, because there is definite movement to it, as much from its canopy sail as from its four masts.

  I realize I’ve been staring up through the canopy. The pictures I’m seeing are in the lace.

  My head hurts. Not just my head. Every muscle in my body aches. If this is a hangover, it is a bad one. I am not a drinker. At least I wasn’t until last night.

  We finished the bottle, and then one from Eva’s cellar, before Jack had the courage to say what he’d come here to say.

  “I am a dead man,” he said.

  “No,” I said, mistaking his anger for grief.

  “It wasn’t Cal you killed,” he said, his eyes burning into mine. “It was me.”

  I had gone to McLean Psyc
hiatric Hospital because I thought I had killed Cal. That was a hallucination. A wish-fulfillment fantasy is what the doctors called it. Seeing Cal Boynton ripped apart by dogs. But Cal was still very much alive. I may have wanted to kill Cal for what he’d done to my sister and my aunt, but my aim was off. It was Jack that I ended up hitting.

  While I was in McLean, Jack had come to see me almost every day. He had driven his father’s truck, lobster traps in the back. He parked in the back lot, away from the other, fancier cars.

  When they started the shocks, I began to lose memory.

  “She may not know you,” the doctors told him. “Sometimes the short-term memory disappears for a while.”

  He waited for me to ask for him. The weather got cold. Still he waited.

  He walked against the wind, his collar up, head down, coat drawn tight around him. I watched him coming through the trees.

  He came every day until the first snow. Until the night his father got drunk and totaled the truck on some black ice.

  “He won’t be coming back,” Eva said. I turned my head toward the wall and stared at the trees. For weeks I stared. I stared at them as the leaves finally fell away and they revealed their lacy black branches underneath. I looked for Jack in the web of lace. He wasn’t there. I looked for Lyndley, too, but she was nowhere. There was one leaf left on the tree, one still hanging on to the very end of a branch, and I watched that leaf, too, until I woke up one morning and found that it had released its hold. I walked to the window and looked down, thinking I would know the leaf in the pile, that I had stared at it for so long I would be able to recognize it anywhere. But it was a leaf like any other now. Browning, dying. Soon they would come and burn it with the others.

  I saw Jack just one more time after that. Almost a year later. It was the day I was leaving for UCLA. They had released me from McLean only because I had a plan. I had submitted my stories to UCLA and been accepted into their writing program. Everyone seemed to agree that it was a good thing to do. Everyone except Eva.

  I stood in the Whaler as Beezer cast off. Jack’s boat was pulling in as we pulled out, both of us standing as we passed each other. He was trying to read my face, looking at me for signs of recognition. I looked back at him, trying to keep my expression blank. I held my breath.

  I actually thought I had fooled him. Until last night.

  My head hurts. The canopy moves and swirls. To get away from it, I roll over in the bed. The motion turns my stomach. I am going to be sick.

  I hoist myself up, holding the bedpost. I move slowly, grabbing onto furniture for balance, pulling myself along until I get to the old marble sink in the corner of the room. I turn on the faucet and wait until it runs cold. I douse my face, then pour a glass and make myself drink the entire thing. Then I throw up.

  I am drenched with sweat.

  I need air.

  I walk to one of the windows and lift it open, but it is too heavy, its sash cord broken and dangling. I look around for something to prop it up with, find an old ruler. I walk across the room to open its opposing window. It holds for a moment, then comes crashing down, just missing my fingers. It slams hard, cracking two panes almost symmetrically in half. It jolts me awake.

  I move carefully window to window, opening them all. The hot breeze fills the room, bringing up street noise.

  The curtains billow and snap like old sails, and the lace canopy furls and fills with air, catching my attention with the sound. There’s a rush of salt air, and then the room is full of sailing ships. I am back in time to the Salem of the China-trade era. The huge ships move slowly by one another in the harbor. The merchants in the streets sell spices to the local mistresses, who fight over them, paying a fortune for a small amount of pepper that they will take home and keep locked up in ornate boxes and almost never serve to anyone.

  I make my way to the edge of the bed. I stretch for the low-hanging border of the canopy, pulling it down. I stuff it under the bed. My head spins and reels. I turn on my side and put my hand against the headboard to still the room. I wait for sleep.

  When I wake up again, it’s noon. I feel a pain in my stomach.

  When was the last time you ate? I imagine Eva asking. She would be right. The pain is hunger.

  I get up. I’m thinking I should try to make my way downstairs for charred toast and tea. Eva’s cure for anything.

  I hear a sound. A voice.

  At first I think I am hearing Eva’s voice again, and then I recognize the Realtor’s nasal twang.

  She told me about the showing, but I have completely forgotten. She didn’t say that I wasn’t supposed to be here when she showed the house. She just assumed that I would be aware of such protocol.

  They are coming up the stairs. I hear the Realtor telling the couple about the suspended staircase and how the beams are cantilevered into the walls so that the stairs seem to have no visible means of support. I can tell she doesn’t know I’m in the house, because the story has changed since I told it to her. She stops at the landing window to highlight the gardens below, adding new hybrid flowers to Eva’s collection, not only the one new rose named for Eva but two or three others that I’ve never heard of and that she seems to be making up on the spot. She has also added something about the French doors on the third floor, something that is totally untrue, but I can see that would be a selling point if it were not such an embellishment. Still, I can tell even from here that the people aren’t interested in the house, that her performance is a total waste of time.

  “I died for you.”

  I stop still. It is Eva’s voice. It is so loud I am certain they must have heard.

  They keep coming up the stairs.

  I have to get out of here, right now.

  Before I have a chance to make my exit, the Realtor and her clients have reached the landing. I move toward the back door. I’m dizzy, feeling my way along the walls as if the room had gone dark, though I can see every object. Sweat pours down my face. The Realtor catches the movement in her peripheral vision and looks up. I see her notice me and then lead their eyes to the Samuel McIntire woodwork, giving me time to make my escape out the back door and down the servants’ stairs.

  I wait for the Realtor in the garden. I am very tense. I can overhear snippets of their conversation as they stand by the gate talking. I am trying to hear them, to ground myself by the sound of their voices, real voices. They are from somewhere in the Midwest. Chicago, maybe. The woman had been to Salem once before, she says, on a tour. She tells the Realtor that she remembered the architecture and thought of Salem when she learned that her husband was about to be relocated to the Boston area.

  I can tell that her husband is less than enthusiastic, both about the house and about Salem.

  “So do they still burn witches in this town?” He is trying to be funny.

  “They don’t burn them, they hang them.” The Realtor smiles. Then she moves the conversation back to the sales pitch. “The property values here are much better than on Beacon Hill,” I hear the Realtor say, trying to charm him. “Or Back Bay for that matter…. You’d pay three to four million for a house like this in Back Bay.”

  The man asks about the commute. Says it took him forty-five minutes to get here from town. There is vague annoyance in his voice at having to be bothered.

  “That’s because of the Big Dig,” the Realtor says to him. “You should have taken the bridge instead of the tunnel.”

  He’s not buying it. I can tell that, and so can she. She tells him about the commuter rail, says it’s within walking distance, twenty minutes to the North Station. What most people do is take the train, she says, but I can tell that this man is not someone who would ever ride the train. This is a man who likes to be in control of his own vehicle.

  The whole showing is a waste of time. The Realtor tells me later that she knew it going in. “He wanted to take out the gardens,” she says, “to put in a second parking space. Can you imagine?”

  She says she has another sh
owing at four and that really it would be better if I were not at home when she comes back. “The owner’s presence tends to intimidate potential buyers,” she says. “At least if they know you’re there.”

  I make my way into the house. Put on water for tea. Regular Assam and charred toast. I make myself swallow. By midday, I am starting to feel a little better.

  I’ve totally forgotten that Ann is scheduled to meet me on her lunch hour to help me deadhead the flowers. She shows up just as the party-boat horns blast noon. “You okay?” she asks. “You look a little pale.”

  “Hungover,” I say. I feel stupid saying it, but it’s convincing.

  “Been there, done that,” she says.

  She doesn’t have a lot of time, so we get to work immediately. We work together well. Moving down the rows, deadheading the huge blossoms. It’s rhythmic, hypnotic: plucking, gathering, handing the basket back and forth. The heat of the sun is soothing to my aching muscles.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  At the end of a long row of peonies, I see something white in the bushes. I lean over and pick up today’s Salem News from where the paperboy has thrown it. I am used to seeing Eva’s face staring back at me from these papers and am relieved for a moment to see that it has been replaced by another, younger face. Then not as relieved when I read the name—Angela Rickey. The hair is severe, pulled back in a style that could easily date to Puritan days. Angela’s disappearance has replaced Eva’s as front-page news.

  I recognize her immediately.

  “She was here,” I say.

  “What?”

  “I saw her. The first day I was here. She came to the door. By the time I got there, she was gone.”

  “Where’s your phone?” Ann asks. “We have to call Rafferty.”

  He arrives within ten minutes.

  I tell him the story. About how I thought she had come back, but it was Beezer and Rafferty instead.

  “Are you certain it was her?” Rafferty pulls out another photo, a better copy of the one the paper had been running.