by Ronald Malfi
“For frogs?”
“For people, too,” Susan said. “People mostly, I guess.”
No, Laurie did not believe in heaven. Neither she nor Ted was religious and they had decided long ago that they wouldn’t impinge any organized religion’s contradictory and judgmental sentiments on their daughter. Now, however, in the face of Susan’s question, she wasn’t sure what the right response should be. There was a latent hopefulness in her daughter’s voice and Laurie didn’t want to be the one to smash that hope.
“What do you think?” Laurie said, turning the question around on her daughter.
Without missing a beat, Susan said, “I think Torpedo is still buried in the yard where me and Daddy put him. I bet if I dig him up, he’ll still be there. And if there was a heaven that people go to, then who is buried in all those graveyards? If they’re in the ground, they can’t be in heaven, too.”
“Some people believe only your spirit goes to heaven,” Laurie said. “Not your whole body.”
“Oh.”
“Do you understand the difference?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does it bother you staying in this house now that you know what happened here?”
“No way. It’s a neat house. I like it a lot.” The girl didn’t appear to fully understand the question. “Daddy said it’s ours now.”
“Well, yes, but we’re going to sell it.”
“How come?”
“Because we don’t live in Maryland. We live in Connecticut.”
“Can’t we just move here? I like it here. I like Maryland.”
“Wouldn’t you miss your friends back home?”
“I could make new friends.”
“You don’t know anything about living here.”
“I do! I know there’s a river on the other side of the woods and Daddy said he would take me out to swim there someday. And I know there’s a neat little house made out of glass in the woods, too.”
Laurie had just broken an egg into the frying pan and now held the two halves of the eggshell in midair, frozen. She looked up sharply at the girl to find her wrinkling her nose again. “You saw it?” Laurie’s voice was nearly a whisper.
“It looks like a big dollhouse,” said Susan enthusiastically. “But it’s all old and dirty and covered under a big tent.”
“When did you see it?”
“The day we got here. Daddy and I went walking down a path through the woods and we found it.”
“I don’t want you to go back there.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so. It’s dangerous and there’s broken glass everywhere. I don’t want you playing back there.”
“I’m careful.”
“No. This is not up for discussion. Promise me you won’t go back there.”
Even at ten, it seemed Susan was able to harness some sense of trepidation from Laurie’s voice, or perhaps from the look on Laurie’s face. The young girl’s eyes hung on her, slightly wider than they generally were. One palm lay flat down on the tabletop beside her bowl of Cheerios and Laurie could see the little pink fingers working in agitation. “Okay,” she said quietly and at last. “I promise.”
And now I’ve just scared the poor kid half to death....
To lighten the tension, Laurie raised her right hand and said, “Girl Scout’s honor?”
“I’m not a Girl Scout.”
Laurie lowered her hand. She felt coldly removed from her daughter. On the stove, the egg sizzled in the pan. “I know you’re not. I was just being funny.”
Susan shrugged and looked down at her cereal. “Wasn’t very funny to me,” she said.
The front door slammed at the opposite end of the house. Ted shouted a friendly halloo down the hallway, his baritone voice full-bodied with reverberation. When he appeared in the kitchen doorway, he was mopping sweat off his brow with a towel. His sweaty T-shirt clung to him and his spandex shorts looked too tight. “Good morning.” He seemed to be in a good mood. “It’s a beautiful day out. How are my favorite ladies?”
“There’s butterflies,” Susan piped up from her chair.
“Yeah? Where?”
The girl pointed to the low bushes outside the bay windows. There were yellow flowers with fuzzy brown centers bristling from the bushes. “Right out there,” Susan said. “I saw them earlier. They were lots of different colors.”
Ted went over and kissed the top of Susan’s head. “Do you know what those flowers are called?” He pointed to the yellow flowers with the brown centers.
Susan shook her head.
“Black-eyed Susans.”
The girl giggled. “You’re lying!”
“I’m not,” Ted said, placing one hand over his heart. Beads of perspiration glistened on his forehead. “Bet you a dollar.”
Susan got up from the table and stood before the windows. She peered down at the flowers that swayed calmly in the early summer breeze. “Wow,” she said. “How come they’re named after me?”
“Because the people who name flowers tried to think of the most beautiful name in the whole world,” Ted said. “But then they realized that ‘Rose’ was already taken.”
“Daddy!” Susan chided, laughing.
Laurie smiled and turned back to the stove. A part of her longed for the easy affection Ted and Susan shared.
“Do you want breakfast?” she asked Ted. “I’m making eggs.”
“Eggs sound wonderful,” he said, coming up beside her and kissing her on the cheek. “I’m gonna grab a quick shower.” He turned back toward Susan as he backtracked out of the kitchen. “You shout for me if you see another butterfly, okay? I don’t wanna miss ’em!”
Again, Susan beamed brightly.
Later, Laurie telephoned the estate liquidator, Stephanie Canton, and set up an appointment for her to stop by at her next available opportunity to conduct a preliminary assessment of her father’s belongings. Laurie assured the woman that everything would have to go because they were selling the house. “Our place back in Hartford is very small,” Laurie confided over the telephone, “and we don’t have the room for anything else. I don’t see me leaving here with a blessed thing.”
“Nonetheless, I always advise all my clients to conduct a comprehensive inventory prior to my arrival.” Stephanie Canton spoke with the frank diction of a military officer. “Things can hide, Mrs. Genarro.”
“Well, okay, but I’m certain we won’t be keeping anything.”
“The earliest I can be there is Friday afternoon.”
“That’s fine,” Laurie said.
“If there is any paperwork for any of the items, please have that on hand.”
“Paperwork?”
“For example, if you have antique furniture, some documentation as to its authenticity would prove beneficial in terms of resale. The same goes for any autographed memorabilia—books, baseball cards, paintings—and the like.”
“Oh, okay. I understand. Sorry, I’ve never done this before.”
On the other end of the phone, Stephanie Canton made a noise that could have been interpreted as either endorsement or derision. “Is there any clothing left behind?”
Left behind, Laurie thought, and shivered. “Yes. All of his clothes.”
“I don’t handle clothing. My recommendation would be to contact the Salvation Army or Purple Heart or any such organization and have the articles donated. It’s a tax write-off.”
“That’s a good idea.”
“You have my number. Call if you have any questions prior to my visit.”
“See you Friday,” Laurie said, and hung up.
She spent the remainder of the day doing just as Stephanie Canton had advised: taking inventory of all the items in the house. When she arrived in her father’s study, she went through the boxes Dora Lorton had packed up, removing all the items from within and setting them down in rows on the desktop like a soldier disassembling a machine gun. Pipes, lighters, candlesticks, incense, a letter opener, sets of
keys, a pewter ashtray with a faded crest engraved in the dish, and similar accoutrements. A second box held silver tie clips, two pocket watches (one gold, one silver, neither operational), old pairs of wire-rimmed glasses, yellowed and brittle stationary, a clutch of pencils punctured with teeth marks and bound together by a rubber band, and a few coffee mugs with unfamiliar emblems on the sides. The third box contained perhaps forty or so records—large vinyl LPs in timeworn sleeves that smelled musty and old. Laurie took out a number of these and examined the sleeves. Frowning, she recognized none of the names, none of the faces. Pursing one album sleeve, she reached in and pinched the LP between her thumb and index finger and slid it out. It was made of a material sturdier than vinyl. She blew a film of dust off the record and saw that the grooves looked to be in workable condition. Nary a scratch was visible. She let the record drop back into the cardboard sleeve, then replaced the album back in the box with the others.
The final box, which was the largest of all the boxes, contained two three-ring binders. The first was full of her father’s paperwork, including the deed to the house, his medical information, bank records, a copy of his will, and various similar documents. The second binder was slimmer than the first and contained grainy photographs as well as a few more recent ones of Susan when she was younger. The photos of Susan were still in the envelopes in which Laurie had mailed them. The older photographs were housed in protective plastic sleeves held in place by the binder rings. She flipped through a number of them. The only people recognizable in any of them were her parents and herself as a little girl. And there were only a slim few of those. One of the photos was of a family trip they had taken to Ocean City one summer. The photo showed the three of them at the cusp of the ocean, smiling widely for the stranger whom her father had enlisted to take the picture. Laurie recalled being worried that the stranger would run off with her father’s camera, but he hadn’t. In the picture, her parents looked lively and healthy and happy. It was not how she remembered them at all.
The last few pages of the album were comprised mostly of photos of strangers. Some were of men working at the old steel mill. Others were of various automobiles. A few strange faces flashed smiles at her. Other photos were more esoteric—a long stretch of blacktop fading to a point at the horizon; an unidentifiable young girl smiling as she leaned out from beneath the shadow of an overpass; two dogs on their hind legs engaged in a fight in a grassy field; several photos of the mill’s stately smokestacks. The next few pages were empty, the protective plastic sleeves holding no photos. She flipped past them to the back of the album. The final few photos were of Laurie, when she had been about Susan’s age. There were no dates printed on the backs of the photographs, but Laurie surmised it was the year before her parents’ separation.
She replaced the photograph binder back in the box, then went upstairs with the keys she had found in the first box. One by one, she tried them on the padlock on the door that led up to the belvedere. None of them was the right key. Frustrated, she made a mental note to call Dora and then went into the bedrooms where she sifted through the drawers of the nightstands and dressers. Most of the items she came across were articles of clothing. Curiously, the top drawer of the nightstand beside her father’s bed contained a silver crucifix and a Bible. The crucifix was perhaps five inches long and it felt weighty and substantial in Laurie’s hand. She had never known her father to be a religious man, and the discovery of the items right there beside the old man’s bed surprised her. She supposed some people became more easily accepting of a higher power the closer they got to death. Wasn’t that why churches were mostly filled with the elderly? Did it become easier to believe in God the older you got or were you just hedging your bets? She set the crucifix on the nightstand, glad to be rid of it.
She proceeded to dump the clothing out onto the floors of the various rooms and then went back downstairs to retrieve a box of trash bags from the kitchen. On her way through the parlor, she found Ted on the sofa, a pen propped in the corner of his mouth, a notebook in his lap. There was the thick John Fish paperback on the table in front of him, the pages dog-eared and tabbed with countless yellow Post-it notes and index cards. She knew he was having a tough time of it. Ted was a true artist at heart, which meant he required constant encouragement and coddling. She had done her best back in Hartford, often to the detriment of her own artistic pursuits, but she just didn’t have it in her at the moment. When he looked up at her despondently, the pen now clutched between his teeth, she could offer him only the most rudimentary nod of consolation. She felt bad about it a second later, but her mind was too overcome by all that now surrounded her to indulge her husband’s practiced sense of humility.
There were two unopened boxes of Glad trash bags beneath the kitchen sink. She took out one box and was about to head back upstairs when she paused midway across the kitchen. Out the bay windows, the day was beginning to grow old. The color of the lawn had deepened, as had the apparent depth of its incline. The lush richness had been drained from the trees. Sodium lights at the far side of the river caused the horizon to glow a vaporous and inhospitable orange.
Two girls were kneeling in the yard, their heads bowed close together as if they were whispering secrets to each other. One was Susan, dressed in one of her long-sleeved cotton tops, her dark-skinned legs folded up under her. She had her dark brown hair pulled back into a stunted little ponytail that curled like a comma from the back of her head. The other girl’s identity remained a mystery, up until Laurie approached the bay windows for a better look.
It was the girl she had seen running across the yard yesterday, the one who had watched her from behind a stand of saplings while Laurie had been examining the remains of the old greenhouse. The girl whom she had thought to be a ghost. She knew this strictly by the girl’s clothes, which seemed outdated, unseasonable, and the wrong size. From her angle at the window, Laurie could not make out the girl’s face.
Laurie backed away from the windows, setting the box of Glad trash bags on the kitchen table. Her feet carried her over to the screen door that led out onto the square slabs of concrete at the back of the house. A chill in the air caused gooseflesh to rise up on her arms. She thought it was awfully cold weather for the beginning of summer. At the center of the yard, the two girls remained with their heads bowed toward one another. Susan appeared to speak while the other girl listened. Then the other girl spoke while Susan cocked her head to one side like an inquisitive dog. Laurie could hear none of what they said. The other girl was dressed improbably in a muted yellow frock with puffy sleeves that reminded Laurie of the title character from Alice in Wonderland. The frock was too big for her and drooped down around the girl’s pale, narrow shoulders, exposing the smooth white rim of her collarbone. The girl’s hair was a striking auburn color, made even more remarkable in the diminishing sunlight, and spilled in waves down her back. The girl’s feet were bare and dirty.
Laurie approached them. When her shadow fell over them, they both looked up at her in what appeared to be practiced unison. Laurie’s eyes flitted to her daughter for just a moment before settling on the other girl.
It was Sadie Russ.
The girl’s face was a moonish oval, the skin pearl-colored and unblemished except for a streak of dirt that started at the corner of her mouth and extended across her right cheek. The girl’s eyes were a deep brown, almost black, beneath curling auburn bangs.
“Hi, Mom,” Susan said. “This is my new friend, Abigail.”
“Hello,” said Abigail.
For a moment, Laurie could not move, could not say a word. She was suddenly aware of a prickling sensation along her scalp and down the nape of her neck as the hairs there bristled. When she spoke, it was as if some ventriloquist were forcing the words from her mouth.
“Hello, Abigail,” Laurie said.
The girl gazed up at her with dark eyes. A few strands of her hair were slicked to the corner of her mouth.
Of course, Sadie Russ was dead.
She had died a long time ago. But this girl . . . this Abigail . . . could have been Sadie’s identical twin.
“How long have you been out here?” Laurie asked Susan.
“Just a little while,” Susan said. “I got bored watching Daddy work.”
Laurie looked down at a shallow hole that had been dug in the ground between the two girls. “What have you two been doing?”
“Looking for treasure,” Susan said.
“Is that right?” Laurie’s throat clicked.
“Abigail says there’s treasure all over the place.”
“Pirates used to bury it close to the beaches,” Abigail said. “That was a long time ago, but they never came back and got all the treasure. Sometimes they forgot where they buried it.”
“Is that true, Mom?” Susan asked her mother. The look on her face expressed that while she did not believe in such nonsense, she very much wanted to.
“I suppose anything is possible,” Laurie said.
“I’ve found gold ’bloons down by the beach before,” Abigail said.
“That’s pirate money,” Susan said, having apparently already been indoctrinated into the vernacular.
“Sounds interesting,” Laurie said. “Do you live around here, Abigail?”
Abigail pointed across the yard toward the moldy fence. For one preposterous moment, Laurie thought the girl was referring to the shaggy willow tree that drooped down over the fence. But then she saw the house through the screen of trees, its back porch lights on. She could make out the rear bumper of the green sedan in the driveway again. Sadie’s old house.
“How nice,” said Laurie. She cocked her head at her daughter. “But now it’s time to wash up for dinner.”
“But what about the treasure, Mom?”
“It’s been there for several hundred years,” Laurie said. “I’m sure it can wait another day.”
Susan planted her hands down in the grass, then popped up onto her feet. She moved with the lissome, springy sensibilities of a gymnast. Like her father, she was a natural athlete.