by Karen Brown
I was sure my great-grandfather had seen what I saw, and recorded his visitors alongside his sketches of the birds, their little clawed feet penciled in a violent grip, similar to the one my mother used on the wheel of the car. His manuals had become my own, their catechism one I memorized as a gullible child—What is the ethereal double? Who travels on the astral plane? How does the clairvoyant receive messages from the dead? Once all manner of dead began to appear to me I began to resent him for passing down his curse, and the manuals revealed themselves for what they were—the esoteric ramblings of a cult. It didn’t matter that I had once believed in them. I felt foolish for doing so now. The Ithaca move came from my hope that the dead might not follow me out of the area, that perhaps they’d been summoned by the inept mediums affiliated with the Spiritualists by the Sea. According to “A Student,” the people I saw were shells of themselves, trapped on the lower astral plane, manifesting in the places they once inhabited. I might be able to leave them behind.
My mother helped with my application, claiming she wished the best for me, but her eagerness also meant I’d played right into her hand. She wanted me gone, away from Del. Three years before, Del had suffered a psychotic break and had been admitted to a hospital for treatment. Though she’d recently settled into a kind of assisted-living arrangement called Ashley Manor, I hadn’t seen her since our family’s last attempt at therapy two years ago, and as the space between Del and me widened like an extending rubber band, my resentment toward my mother grew. I was being shuttled out of the way, while Del, still her favorite, was allowed to stay close.
“While you were in the kitchen, Detective Thomson asked me a lot of questions about Del,” I said.
My mother pursed her lips but kept her eyes on the road, the river a dark, churning stripe beyond the guardrail and the dead summer grass. “He’s a nuisance.”
“He’s been to talk to her at Ashley Manor,” I said.
As I guessed she would, my mother glanced at me, concerned. “Your sister never mentioned that.”
“She told me in one of her letters,” I said.
My mother seemed to relax then. She sighed. “I don’t think we can believe everything Del writes in her letters.”
“Oh, I know what to believe,” I said. “And what not to believe.”
I saw the shape of her mouth like a rebuke. She suspected I did know, and held her own resentment against me for keeping things from her.
I was a prickly girl, difficult to love.
The summer I was fifteen, David Pinney died. After that, I saw the dead again for the first time since I’d seen Sister in the barn, and Del’s behavior first bloomed out of control. She’d always been a little reckless—the result of imaginative plans and games that my mother couldn’t help but marvel at. But her inventiveness took a self-destructive turn after that disastrous summer. Despite my admittedly distracted efforts to keep track of her, during the next year Del was caught with various boys—in cars, in a camper sitting in someone’s side yard, in the Mile Creek Beach Club changing rooms. Her favorite place to take boys was a ravine off Mile Creek Road, the edge of someone’s property where two cars had been abandoned—the springs and tufts of stuffing sprouting from the vinyl seats, moss and fern growing out of the rusted floorboards. There were drugs involved, too, and alcohol. I’d followed her and found our grandfather’s old bottle of Glenfiddich wedged into a wheel well. When I’d confronted her she’d simply grinned, grabbed the bottle back from me, unscrewed the top, and taken a swig.
“You’re such an innocent, Martha Mary.”
The following year things worsened, and I’d wake at night to Del talking in her sleep. She always sat upright. Sometimes, she stood in the closet. I was half-asleep, and the talking rarely made any sense. I would awaken with only pieces of things—her tone, imploring or urgent, a word or two—camellia or mirror? Broken branch? I stopped trying to understand and I accepted the spiral of words that charted her forgetting everything—who she was, what she meant to me. It was a sad sort of relief to think that the only thing allowing me to slacken my watch over her was the understanding that she had moved into a place I could not follow.
Even my mother could no longer excuse Del’s behavior as brilliance, and when I was a senior in high school and she was sixteen, she was sent away, to a place that had been founded in 1824 as the Connecticut Retreat for the Insane, then renamed the Hartford Retreat, and finally, more hopefully, the Institute of Living. Still the place couldn’t shake the pall that came from the many lobotomies performed there from the 1940s to the 1960s. Gene Tierney, the actress who appeared in Laura and Tobacco Road, was admitted in the 1950s and suffered twenty-six shock treatments that robbed her of her memory. She tried to flee but was caught and returned. None of these things could convince my mother or my father that they had made a mistake sending Del there. They were resigned, convinced that this type of thing ran in the family—citing Great-aunt Rose, who had lived out her days in that Fairfield asylum in Newtown, long since closed down and abandoned to ruin.
Without Del, I worried I’d come home to an ambulance in my driveway, men from the hospital poised to chase me down and drag me in, too. Gone was the sister who posed beside me in photographs of our childhood, the two of us wearing Easter dresses or Christmas robes, identical except for color, Del with her blond hair and winning smile, me pouting and angry over some slight no one ever took the time to understand. I knew I was being selfish, that in some way Del had been taken in my place. If I had described my visions, I would have been the one drugged and shuffling through therapy groups and arts and crafts. But I wasn’t brave enough to confess anything.
After almost six months of unsuccessful family therapy sessions, I drove alone to the Institute of Living to visit Del. I was preparing to graduate. It was clear that Del’s participation in teenage milestones—the part-time job, the acquiring of a driver’s license, the various mortifications of high school from her sophomore year onward—would be cut short. By then she’d been transferred to a residential house on the grounds. It was a spring day, the dogwood was blooming, and I waited in the lobby for over an hour, only to be told Del didn’t want to see me. I was hurt, and furious.
I never tried to visit again. We wrote old-fashioned letters back and forth—a method of communication that let me couch my rancor in the false recounting of my life: details of shopping trips with our mother that I never took, a day with my father at museums in the city that never occurred, the date with a man I met at a play I never attended. I knew she’d see through my lies—lying was what we did best together, and so it was my best revenge to hide my life beneath a story of one. In truth, I rarely left the house. I’d gotten leery of the dead. They filled me with regret. And the living troubled me more. At least with the dead, there were no questions—just their longing, and my renouncing of it. I was an intermediary who refused to function in her role. Somewhere, grieving parents and siblings and lovers suffered, and I denied them any solace.
As I sat in the car, reassessing my earliest letters to Del at the Institute, my mother drove through Liberty, home of the old Grossinger’s Resort, where, I imagined, throngs of astral inhabitants reclined on dilapidated loungers. As we passed through the seemingly empty stretches of Binghamton and Lisle into Ithaca, my mother hummed along with a song on the radio, and I sensed she had hopes that I would make a new start, and the pressure of her hopefulness was yet another burden. Perhaps she knew I was fleeing, had sensed, as I did, that the detective’s questions seemed to have become more probing, more pointed, that his gaze had hardened, become almost wily, like a man who had a taste of something he liked.
He’d sat in a chair brought in from the dining room—he needed it for his back, he had said, and whenever he visited, my mother brought the chair into the living room, and he thanked her—“Ah, you remember”—as if her courtesy, too, were being cataloged in a file.
“I have a girl here, a Jane Roberts, who says you had a crush on David,” he’
d said.
I’d leaned forward and smiled. “My old friend Jane said that?”
Detective Thomson leaned forward as well. He cradled his coffee in his two hands, the missing part of his finger camouflaged by the others.
“Well, she doesn’t want anyone to know,” I said, keeping my voice low, eyeing my mother on the couch, her knees pressed together at the hem of her Lilly Pulitzer skirt. “About us.”
“About who?” the detective said. “You and Jane?”
“Oh, good heavens,” my mother said, slapping her lap, rising to her feet.
Detective Thomson leaned away, a flush rising from his collar. I waited a moment, watching my mother. “It’s true,” I said. “We had a little crush on each other, Jane and I. Maybe it was more than that. Do I have to tell you everything?”
My mother’s jaw tightened and she sat back down, smoothing her skirt. “Is this what you wanted to know, Mr. Thomson? Is this what you’ve been digging around for? Some scandal? Some schoolgirl relationship between my daughter and her childhood friend?”
The detective had kept his eyes on me. Where once he might have smiled indulgently, this time he did not. “Are you saying you don’t like boys,” he asked.
“I’m saying if I had a crush on anyone, it was Jane. Not some boy I didn’t even know.”
“You’re a clever young woman,” he said.
It was July, and the drapes on the living-room windows blew in, carrying in the smell of salt, the tones of the Spiritualists’ organ. Detective Thomson shifted in the chair, and the antique joints groaned. Outside, the Sound broke forcefully against the seawall. A strange little bird chirruped in the crab apple.
“No,” I had said, cupping my upturned hands in my lap. “Del was the clever one.”
Now, beyond my mother’s profile at the wheel of the car, Route 79 wound alongside green swaths of hills still damp from the recent rain. This was an isolated valley with a poor yearly sunlight allotment and haphazard cell phone reception—another version of a sanatorium, a place my mother could tuck me away, the way you pressed a photograph into the back of a drawer—and be free of me. But I might be free of her, too, and I might find someone else to love me.
3
All the dorm rooms were filled by the time the university accepted me, so I’d rented an apartment in an old house, where a great elm cast a dark shadow over the porch. The house stood on a street of similarly grand old places, each shaded by a tree, their roots disrupting the cement sidewalks in front. Mine was a brick Italianate house with a wide cornice and elaborately carved brackets and window caps. The apartment was up a staircase that once might have been glamorous when the house was still a single-family residence. The place had been advertised as a “studio.” I would be living in one room with a twelve-foot ceiling, a decorative fireplace, and an efficiency-sized stove, sink, and refrigerator—so small they seemed like playhouse furnishings. My mother, decorator extraordinaire, seemed not to have found any inspiration in the room, or else she didn’t see the need to apply her skills to it. She scoped the space out, and then we left and found a used-furniture store nearby and purchased a couch that folded out into a bed.
“This will serve a dual purpose,” she said. “You’ll have room to move around once you fold it up.”
She paid the man to deliver the couch bed, along with a table and chairs, which, when she tried to gain my opinion, I said were fine. In the short time since I’d arrived in town I’d changed my mind about being there, and I didn’t care what we purchased. I went along, glumly, feeling myself resist confessing that we should forget the whole thing and head home. When Detective Thomson had stood, slowly, and, stepping toward my mother’s front door, paused to look back at me, I’d felt that same small twinge of fear I’d felt five years before, the first time he’d come, and I knew returning home was no longer a choice.
On the sidewalk out in front of the used-furniture shop, a taped-up poster read HELP FIND MARY RAE SWINDAL and below that bold type was a photograph of a young woman wearing a formal dress, her dark hair styled into pinned-up curls that fell beyond her shoulders, like a prom queen or a princess. Her expression was droll, as if she knew the satin sheen of the dress, the bright smear of lipstick, provided only the impression of a beautiful woman. MISSING SINCE FEBRUARY 14, the poster announced. More of these posters, encased in plastic sleeves, flapped on telephone poles all along the street.
Driving in, we’d passed stretches of desolate space, open and wild-seeming, the trees dense on the removed hillsides, the occasional collapsed structures with weathered gray wood siding. I’d grown up surrounded by acres of professionally kept grounds, stone walls, and wild grapes. There’d been the rejuvenating smell of the sea. Here lay a landscape of despair. My mother sensed it, too. Her voice rose in pitch, into a false cheeriness that made her sound manic. My idea of a new start had quickly reverted to a keen sense of abandonment, similar to the feeling I’d had when I was first separated from Del. I’d had other friends, but none could take her place. We’d shared a bedroom our entire lives. She knew me better than anyone. And I’d found it difficult to sleep with her empty bed two feet away. Del’s absence had been like a death. I’d been left behind, grieving and lost.
We stopped at Wegmans grocery store for staples, and the same plea to find Mary Rae Swindal was tacked to the bulletin board in the entryway. If my mother noticed the posters and their unnerving portent, she didn’t mention it. The store was filled with students, young people who despite their familiar appearance—T-shirts, shorts, battered flip-flops—seemed entirely unlike me. In the car again, my mother commented on the number of young people we’d run into in the checkout line.
“Any one of them might be a new friend,” she said, halfheartedly. While I had never been able to tell her why I felt so removed from the rest of the world, she understood that I did, that I was. Just as she’d named Del “exceptional,” I was “introverted” or “reserved.”
On the way out of Wegmans I’d paused at the flyer of Mary Rae Swindal tacked to the bulletin board, and as I reached up and touched the image, the bright glare of the grocery store, its heat, its smell of baking bread, gave way to the cold narrow room with the iced-over window, the nude girl on the bed. The cold struck me. My breath fanned out. My mother had already passed through the automatic doors, and I heard her calling—Martha, she called, as from a far-off place, and then she was beside me and had pulled my hand away.
“Martha,” she said, sharply.
In my great-grandfather’s manuals, there were passages about the psychometrist, how she perceives her images by touch, holding an item—a coin, a letter—in her hand, and how after a minute or two the external surroundings disappear and a series of pictures begin to appear. Sounds, too, are heard. Perfumes smelled, and even the sense of heat and cold, dryness and moisture, are reproduced with surprising clearness.
Back at my new apartment, the landlord, Geoff, came out of his place across the hall to meet us and introduce himself, almost bashfully, to my mother. They were nearly the same age. He had a British accent, unruly gray hair, and a dog named Suzie, a black-and-white setter that I shied from, and which, sensing my fear, Geoff kept on its leash. My mother, as if to prove to me that dogs were friendly, reached out to pat her, and the dog burrowed her head into my mother’s crotch.
“I see you’ve purchased your bits and bobs,” Geoff said.
He called my apartment a bedsit, and he charmed my mother with an easy, guileless smile and a pipe-smoking persona. After he’d gone she said he seemed just as friendly as he had on the phone.
“We know nothing about that man,” I said. “Jack the Ripper had a British accent, too.”
She opened the refrigerator and bent down to look into its depths. “You won’t agree with me about anything, will you?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” I said.
She bustled up and down the staircase, hauling my boxes, revealing a sturdy stalwartness I’d never fully noticed before. We�
�d brought the basics—pieces of my grandmother’s old Limoges china, some scarred copper-bottomed pots, and utensils.
“What more could you need?” my mother said, putting cups and saucers away in a cabinet above the sink.
We’d brought back a lamp and a small, ornate mirror that she hung beside the door.
“Now you can check what you look like before you go out,” she said, like an indictment.
“I can ask it who is the fairest in the land,” I said.
I wandered over toward the window and looked out at the tree-shaded street. I pressed my lips to the glass and closed my eyes.
My mother’s plan had been to stay the night in a motel nearby, but she checked her watch and I knew she wanted nothing more than to leave me entirely and be on her way.
“This hasn’t taken nearly as long as I thought,” she said. She hefted her leather bag onto her shoulder and crossed her arms, resolute.
“What about our tour of the campus?” I said, hating myself for sounding so desperate.
She pursed her lips. “Do I need to do that with you?”
I followed her down the stairs to the porch, and then out to the street. A breeze picked up, moving the elm’s heavy branches. A dog barked nearby, and I feared the scratch of its nails on the pavement, the jangle of its tags coming closer.
“Are you sure you should go?” I said. “It looks like it might storm.”
And then in the flickering elm shade a woman appeared, as if produced from its shadows. She stood to the right of my mother’s car in a coat far too heavy for the summer day—an eggplant-colored down coat, woolen gloves, a pretty cloche hat. Her dark hair held the semblance of the curls from her poster, but ice matted them together. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick, and she played with her necklace—an amethyst pendant, the kind of necklace I’d seen in my mother’s Spiegel catalog as a child. The missing Mary Rae. I felt a jolt of excitement—I almost called out to my mother, who had already climbed into the car, “She’s here! I’ve found her!”