by Bill Clegg
Dana slowly pushes her chair back from the dining room table and begins to stand, considering for the first time since she arrived where she will sleep. Before she is fully upright, she hears a sound at the front door. Less a knock and more a pounding, which stops soon after it starts. The silence that follows is broken by the creak of a door and a voice that pierces air, time, and Dana’s equilibrium. She falls back into the chair with a thud the moment the words hit her ears: Dana, get out here. It’s Jackie.
Jackie
The foyer is empty and immediately familiar. The space never looked to Jackie like the first room of a house so much as how she imagined the lobby of a fancy hotel. She almost turns back but before she can, Dana appears, her manner like a rattled hostess receiving an expected, but late, guest. She leans against the white molding that frames the entryway and smiles, as if trying to pretend that seeing Jackie face-to-face for the first time since they were nineteen, standing in Edgeweather’s foyer in a pink flannel nightgown, navy wool car coat, and knee-length black rubber boots, carrying a brown briefcase, was perfectly natural.
Without moving from where she stands, or shifting her stance, Dana starts to speak.
Jackie, I…
Before she can finish her sentence, Jackie interrupts, pointing her finger in front of her.
Stop it. I didn’t come here to catch up or hear any stories. Just tell me what you’re up to. Jackie’s tone is direct, controlled. She drops her finger, puts both hands back on the briefcase and takes a few steps toward Dana before setting it down on the foyer floor between them. They are less than a few feet away from each other now and up close Jackie is shocked to see how much Dana resembles her mother when they were young. The same lines fanning from her eyes, crossing at abrupt angles between her brows. The same wide, thin shoulders that seemed always to be tilting slightly back, even when she was seated, as if they held carefully tucked wings. It occurs to Jackie that she and Dana are now both significantly older than their parents had been when they were growing up. She knows this should not surprise her, but still it erases whatever else she had intended to say. Mute, she stands a few yards away from Dana, who seems to be cataloging every detail of her slapdash outfit. For only a fleeting second, Jackie regrets not getting dressed properly before rushing over.
For a while, the two women simply stare at each other and say nothing. Forty-nine years, Jackie thinks. The silence between them was older than Rick and more than twice as long as the time they’d actively been in each other’s lives. Arms crossed, Jackie fidgets her middle finger over her left elbow, feels the wrinkled skin there sagging like buckled fabric, the joint and bone jutting beneath, brittle as twigs.
Dana speaks first. Can I get you something to drink?
Jackie regains some of her composure and manages to restate what she’d said a few minutes before. Stop it. Stop fooling around. What are you up to?
Dana steps from the wall. Ok. Ok, then. Let’s have it out. But not here. She stoops to collect the briefcase from the foyer floor, turns her back to Jackie and heads toward the stairs. Jackie doesn’t budge. Not before Dana is more than halfway up the first flight does Jackie unfold her arms and begin to cross toward the bottom stair.
Remember the Knees? Dana calls out behind her as she clears the landing. Do you remember how they could make something that was one way appear to be another? Rocks into jewels and all that. You did that, too.
Jackie stops on the fifth stair and steadies herself on the dark railing before looking up at Dana who’s still speaking. Before tonight, she hadn’t thought of the fairy people who lived in the forest along the river in a long time, how obsessed she and Dana were with finding the treasure they’d hidden in the water. They’d both taken it so seriously, and never once suggested to the other that it was anything but real.
Dana continues speaking as she climbs the stairs. She faces forward but her head tips back, up, and just slightly to the right.
You were so determined not to see Floyd clearly. But then I made it much worse. I know that I did. At the time I thought what I was doing was right—ok that’s not quite true. But you do have a part in all this. You can’t pretend that you don’t. I’m done taking the blame for everyone… And I’m tired of your not knowing.
Jackie knows she needs to leave. She cannot stay and hear Dana accuse her of further wrongdoings and take more potshots at Floyd. Jackie turns to go, but as she does notices the chandelier hanging from the ceiling above the landing. It’s a small contraption of crystal and undusted metal—light splitting and fracturing through its dangling ornaments which at first look like brilliant, many-fractaled crystals, but up close are pear-shaped, and plain. Six of them hang evenly above a clear, fist-sized crystal finial, which as a child, as now, made her think of a small cannonball. Jackie has a sudden desire to reach up and rip the useless bauble from its chain and hurl it at Dana, watch it clip the side of her head and send her careening down the stairs.
Follow me, Dana shouts from the top step, interrupting Jackie’s reverie. It’s time you saw the rocks as they were.
Dana
The gray carpet is too clean. No dust motes or mouse droppings, no stains or ruin. In fact it looks like it has been vacuumed recently. In decades, Dana thinks, no one had visited Edgeweather—certainly no children or nannies who were the only ones who ever came up to the third floor—so it makes no sense to her that it should be so tidy and clean. She glances toward the hall where the Saturday night bedroom she and Jackie decorated had been. After she’d graduated from college, her mother mentioned casually on a phone call that she’d needed the room for storage and had what she called the bedroom set moved into the apartment where Joe Lopez was still living. Dana cannot remember how she responded to her mother, but she remembers feeling punched. She wonders now if those beds are still above the garage and filled with Kenny’s children. Or possibly grandchildren, given his age. She softens at the thought until she notices the very large television in the main room and remembers Kenny’s terrified mother from the kitchen. This is where the woman has been living and clearly long enough that she’s assembled an entertainment center where there used to be a simple RCA set with rabbit ears and slow moving drifts of static. Odd, she calculates quickly, how Kenny’s mother could afford this fancy unit and not enough to rent an apartment. A swift flame of righteous anger lights, and not only does Dana feel vindicated for being upset in the kitchen earlier, she completely forgets who is standing only a few feet behind her, having just followed her up the stairs.
Before she turns around, Jackie begins. Don’t speak Floyd’s name again. You of all people have no right to make judgments about anyone, especially him. And to me? Jackie starts to say more, but Dana interrupts.
You know nothing. The words spring from her throat before she’s considered them, but they don’t surprise her. They are the words she’s been silently thinking since Jackie stormed into her house in nightgown and coat looking like someone who’d wandered out of a nursing home. Without intending them to be, they are the simplest, plainest explanation for why they are here, speaking for the first time since they were nineteen years old, why Jackie is red-faced and furious in a room where they’d spent thousands of easy, joyful hours together.
With her back still to Jackie, Dana eyes the far end of the room, where a hallway starts. She pushes against a memory, but standing so near the place it was created makes it difficult to suppress. Agitated, she squints to see if she can find the knob on the first door, but nothing beyond the first few inches of floor and wall are visible. You know nothing, she repeats, now rebuking her younger, more foolish self, and naming the old weight of another secret. She looks into the hallway again to find the knob on the door she now feels desperate to locate. Her pulse hurries. Behind her, the sound of Jackie’s footfalls down the stairs. But she is sixteen again, unable to follow.
* * *
For the first time, she would have the house to herself. She’d realized this before the portrait photo
grapher she’d escaped Jackie’s prom with had even started his truck. It was a Saturday night and Dana’s parents were in the city at a wedding. The original plan had been for Joe Lopez to take the girls back to Jackie’s house no later than midnight, but sneaking out of the ski lodge early meant no one would be looking for her for at least a few hours. As Dana’s father had ordered, Joe was waiting in the parking lot until the dance ended, and Jackie was too busy chasing Floyd to notice.
His name was Ben, though it hadn’t occurred to Dana to ask until moments before she marched him through Edgeweather’s front door and bee-lined for the pantry cupboard where the alcohol was kept. You live here?, he’d asked for the second time. She started to answer but hesitated. My parents work for the owners and they’re not around, she said, resorting to a new game of role-playing since her public high school prom fantasy hadn’t played out as she’d expected. We live above the garage, she lied, as she poured more whiskey into the flask she’d swiped from her father’s fishing vest earlier—more as a prop initially than as a means to get loaded—and headed for the stairs. Jesus, he yelled, louder than she thought him capable of, a new energy in his voice as he looked up at the high ceilings and down the hall to the foyer, these cats are loaded. What the hell.
What Dana knew about Ben was what he’d told her in the car: that he’d dropped out of his junior year at UConn the year before and was scraping money together to go to San Francisco by photographing weddings and proms and christenings. His aunt was the gym teacher at the high school and she’d been the one who’d arranged for him to take photographs at the prom. He’d mentioned no less than four times that she was going to be furious that he’d left before finishing the job. Photography had been a hobby, he’d explained as he drove, his right hand moving from the steering wheel to her shoulder, then to the top of her knee, which he squeezed and stroked as if it were perfectly natural.
Dana had been kissed by a few boys in school and most recently by the pimply son of one of her parents’ friends in Palm Beach who’d taken her sailing over the Christmas holiday. She hadn’t been attracted to him but she wanted to practice kissing with her tongue so she didn’t seem like a novice when the time came with someone she liked. Jackie was shocked that she’d kiss someone she didn’t think was handsome, but for Dana it was a practical matter. Ben’s hand on her knee felt like those pimply kisses, like something to endure in order to get what she needed; in this case it was deliverance from the prom where Jackie had ditched her to orbit as near as she could to Floyd.
Dana didn’t understand why Jackie was working so hard. She’d never looked prettier—the dress was a little corny but at least it fit well, unlike the rainbow of baggy pastel sacks the other girls had on. As she ignored Ben’s voice and hand, Dana wondered if Jackie’s fawning over Floyd’s sister had managed to draw his attention by now. She hoped not. It stung to remember how the evening had begun, arriving at Jackie’s, entering the living room and finding her holding up an old shawl of her mother’s, sarcastically asking if she should wear it. When she winked at Dana it was obvious she’d walked into a disagreement and that Dana’s role now was to say, emphatically, no, which she did and in a tone she instantly regretted as Jackie’s mother winced and collected the shawl in her arms and carried it back to where it came from. Later, when Dana slipped onto Jackie’s wrist the corsage she’d asked Joe Lopez to collect from the flower shop, she felt a mixture of self-consciousness and giddy surprise that the evening was unfolding as she’d imagined. The idea of going with Jackie to her prom was at first more of a dare, a proposition born of a whim when Jackie mentioned the event months before. The night was clearly a big deal at Housatonic Valley Regional High School, and important to Jackie, and the more Dana heard about it the more she didn’t want to be left out. So she needled and pushed and eventually Jackie agreed.
After all that, she’d left the prom early. As Ben’s small truck rattled farther away from the dance, and his hand moved like a greedy leech across her knee, Dana worried she’d overreacted, and that bringing a stranger back to Edgeweather was a mistake. He was handsome in an Easy Rider kind of way with his ponytail and leather wrist band, and he’d been flirtatious with and focused on her when Jackie hadn’t been. The more whiskey she drank from her father’s flask, the less worried she became. She’d dismiss him when she was ready, but not yet.
From the moment she and Jackie stepped up to Ben’s makeshift studio at the far end of the ski lodge, he was alert and smitten. The girls put on a show as he focused his lens and snapped picture after picture, Dana flinging her arm around Jackie, sitting her on her lap, even kissing her on the cheek. As she pushed the envelope further and further, Jackie, who was game at first, seemed distracted and quickly cooled. Before Dana was ready to stop, Jackie wriggled away claiming she was hungry. This is when they parted, Jackie heading straight to the table where she’d insisted they sit, across from Floyd, who’d stopped her from falling earlier, and his sister, Hannah, whom Jackie had never once before mentioned but all of a sudden treated like a best friend. He lifted me like I didn’t weigh anything!, she’d gushed to her. He’s much taller than when we were in elementary school together.
Dana had heard and seen enough. The evening they’d planned and shopped for and been excited about for months had been ruined. She’d watched Jackie make a fool of herself, and for a boy who barely noticed her. Let’s go, Dana told Ben, though she didn’t know his name at that point; and just as she expected he would, despite the line of six couples who would never get their portraits taken, he packed up his cameras, lights, and backdrop, and out they went.
She took him to the third floor because there were no family pictures there and also she didn’t want him in her bedroom. From the second they’d cleared the top of the stairs, his attitude shifted. She hadn’t yet turned the light on when he came from behind and had his hands on her—one on her chest and the other trying to shove aside the gray taffeta under the skirt of her dress. The shift in dynamic was so abrupt she thought at first he was joking. Hey, cut it out, she snapped, as though she were still in control. But he persisted and soon there was no cloth or ruffle between his hand and her skin. Stop it!, she screamed, still registering the physical barrier that had been breached. She pushed him away but he grabbed her arm. Oh no, he instructed. The cold expectation in his voice sobered her and she realized now that she’d steered herself into a horrible trap. The house was empty. Joe Lopez and probably Jackie, too, still thought she was at the prom.
Hey, relax, what’s the big hurry, she stalled, trying to reclaim some trace of friendliness between them, but he pulled her toward him, roughly, and told her to shut up. By this point she’d taken her shoes off and while she knew she couldn’t get past him to the stairs, she could, if she got free, run down the hall to one of the rooms there and possibly lock herself in. As she got closer to him, his hand relaxed slightly and she slid free, sprinted ahead and grabbed a door handle. When she yanked it open, a shock of moonlight blinded her. She maneuvered behind the door to shut it, and as she did recognized the room as one used for storage, the one with a crescent window, which that night framed and refracted the bright light of a full moon. When she heard footsteps behind her in the hall she rushed to lock the door, but it was too late. Ben pulled it back so hard she almost fell, but she was able to let go, scramble to her feet and run into the room. As she neared the window, she pictured herself jumping through the glass onto the roof, but before considering whether this was actually an option, Ben’s hands reached her. As if he’d read her mind he slammed her into the window, the glass and wood buckled behind her but did not break. Now YOU cut it out!, he hollered and pushed her harder against the window, the bottom sill pinching against the back of her leg. With one hand on her throat, he started pulling and tugging at her dress with the other, and when he finally found the zipper he yanked it so hard the fabric ripped. The sound sharpened Dana’s panic and she surged with clenched fists and began bashing the side of his head with all h
er strength. She would never know if it was surprise or genuine pain, but Ben let go long enough for her to run past him, into the hall, and down to her bedroom on the second floor where she forced her shaking hands to lock the door. When she heard him descend the stairs looking for her, she called out until he came to her door. As he shook the knob and began hitting the door, she tried to summon a tone she’d heard her mother use with people when something went wrong and there were no maids or doormen or drivers to step in, most recently at the baggage claim at the Palm Beach airport when the suitcase with her jewelry briefly went missing. Unacceptable, she’d interrupted the Pan Am employee as he politely explained the efforts being made, and then dismissed him as if she owned the airline, You need to find it. Summoning her mother’s authority, Dana spoke with as little desperation as she could. I have a phone in here, she lied, and I’ve called the police who are on their way now And you should know this: My name is Dana Goss and my family owns this house and is close friends with the governor of the state of Connecticut, another lie, and I promise you that if you don’t leave this second you will spend the rest of your life in jail. After a short silence, she heard his shoe scuff near the door; then the sound of him running erratically down the hall and stairs followed not long after by the dim growl of his truck starting outside.