by Rhian Ellis
He came to me; he said my name. Why? Could the disturbance of his bones have shaken his soul loose, the way prodding a dead animal might release a cloud of flies? I didn’t think so. He had come to me for a reason. To warn me? Maybe. Maybe he meant to taunt me.
I wanted to hear his voice again. I wanted to see him. If I tried hard I could see his face in the shadows of the hills beyond the lake, his features alive and shifting, and I could see him in the ripples on the water. The shape of his body was outlined in the trees above my head. He was everywhere, everywhere. Inside me, something trembled and broke free: love—love and horror.
4
invisible
During the night a storm passed through. Asleep, I interpreted the noise of rain to be a train I was riding, though in waking life I’d never been on one. I didn’t know where I was going or where I had been, but the train rocked from side to side as if it was going very fast, and the landscape out the windows was blurred. An old man leaned close to me.
It’s going to crash, he whispered. He nodded his head toward the window. If I were you, I’d jump.
Oh, I couldn’t do that, I said.
He shrugged. Well, I can.
And, scampering like a leprechaun over the seats, he climbed up to the window and leapt out. His coat billowed out behind him. I gasped awake.
I was lying on the living room couch. It was still dark; I had no way of telling what time it was. When I’d come inside after my walk to the lake, I hadn’t felt tired enough to go to bed, so I’d turned the television back on and watched some of a late-night talk show, though I must have fallen asleep in the middle of it. Someone, Ron no doubt, had turned the television off during the night. It seemed he also pulled an afghan over me. This touched me, though I was a little bothered to think he’d seen me sleeping. I hoped I’d kept my mouth closed. I fell quickly back to sleep, my jaw clenched tightly shut.
When I woke again, it was to a peculiar sound: a persistent scratching. I listened to it for a long time before opening my eyes, trying to figure out what it was. My mother, scraping the black from her toast? A dog, wanting in? But I no longer lived with my mother, and we didn’t have a dog. Finally I opened my eyes, but saw nothing that solved the mystery. The room was filled with a dull gray light. The place was a mess; tools were scattered around from the latest renovation project—Ron was building a new bannister—and magazines about health and vegetarianism and the men’s movement covered every surface. None of this stuff was mine; I kept my things upstairs, in my rooms.
With the afghan still pulled around my shoulders, I stumbled into the kitchen. Nothing there, either. But when I looked through the glass pane of the door to the back porch, I saw Ron. He was sitting cross-legged on the porch floor, scraping hard at a small animal hide that had been stretched and nailed to a board on his lap. His curly head was bent in concentration, and he didn’t see me. I recoiled, backed quickly away, and sat down at the kitchen table.
It didn’t take me long to figure it out. Jenny had remarked a few weeks before that Ron had run over a beaver in his truck—the jaunty brown truck that, as my mother once pointed out, looked just like Ron, with its rear end sticking up in the air—and, consumed with guilt, he decided that the best way to honor the animal was to cure its hide and make a ceremonial drum out of it. Jenny had mentioned this in way of warning: unless I wanted to know what a dead beaver smelled like, I should stay out of the back shed.
It wasn’t until this point, actually, that I remembered myself, and remembered the day before. It came back to me in a rush—the body in the woods, the news article, Peter’s voice. My heart skittered. For many months after Peter died, I felt the same way when I woke up each morning, remembering everything anew.
The train dream, the beaver hide, Peter’s bones. Together, they seemed to possess a secret and complicated meaning, one just out of my reach. I stood up and began making my coffee and toast, trying to clear my head. And as I busied myself, the world did indeed seem to fall back into its customary patterns. The rain tapped lightly on the window, and the smell of coffee filled the kitchen. First I’d eat breakfast, then take a shower, then go to work.
But just as I was sitting down to eat, the phone rang. We had an old-fashioned rotary phone whose fierce jangle never failed to startle me. I swallowed a mouthful of toast, and it rang again.
It was my mother. I knew this even before I answered it, because she was the only person who ever telephoned our house this time of day—she had no qualms about calling whenever it occurred to her. Sometimes I wondered if she thought that I, like one of her spirits, sprung into life only in reference to her.
“Yes?”
“Naomi, have you read last night’s paper?”
Uh-oh. “Not yet.”
“Well, go read it. There’s an article on some bones they found in the woods outside Wallamee. I want to talk to you about it. I think I know whose they are.”
“Mama—I can’t. I have to go to work.”
“Not now!” she said impatiently. “Come over for supper tonight. Six o’clock. Bring Vivian. Honestly, I’m so excited I’m having palpitations.”
She hung up.
Mechanically, I finished my breakfast. Ron was still out on the porch, scraping away. The sound of it had become somehow reassuring, and I sat there for a little while, listening and imagining the poor beaver’s last minutes, the screeching of Ron’s tires, the look on his face. Then I went upstairs and got ready for work.
Outside the rain had mostly stopped, and as I stepped out the door a sun-sized hole appeared in the clouds, allowing Train Line a brief but dazzling spell of illumination. Everything glittered. Perhaps, I thought, heaven had opened up a trapdoor for me. It seemed likely that at any moment someone would reach down and drag me up through it.
As I made my way uphill toward the library, however, it began to rain again.
I worked all day. By three I had a tidy stack of newly cataloged books, including one called Natural Philosophy, which was a science text from the 1880s and not a philosophy book at all. Its deceptive title had apparently gotten it onto our shelves by mistake. Still, I found it absorbing and quite entertaining—it was illustrated with drawings of dour, bearded men conducting experiments in frock coats—and it kept me from thinking too much about the unburied bones across the lake. One chapter described the nature of light: a vibration of ether, it said. Some troubled reader had scrawled in a margin Where is God in all this?
I closed the book on my finger, uncertain where on the shelves it belonged, if anywhere. I was suddenly intensely aware of the physical world around me: the dust motes spiraling through the air, the relationship between the weight of each book and the force required to lift it. There is something to be said for the concrete world, I thought. Carefully, I erased the marginalia and gave the book a place in the philosophy section. The scientific method, I decided, was in fact a very serviceable philosophy.
Bolstered by this idea, I put on my sweater and locked up. Today was the first day of school, and I would be spending the rest of the afternoon with Vivian. Every day at three during the school year the bus dropped her off at the front gate, where I’d sit and wait for her on a squat concrete pillar, one of two put there to stop cars from smashing into the gatehouse as they rounded the curve. A gatekeeper worked here in the summer season, taking money from tourists and selling programs, but now the gatehouse was boarded up and the wooden drop-gates stored for winter. Years before, I’d spent a couple of summers as a gatekeeper, on the early morning shift. I remembered it would get so cold I’d have to turn the space heater on, and shed layers of sweaters as the day warmed. No one came through the gate until nine or so. Until then I’d read, or just stare at the trees and the empty road and the bit of lake I could see from the window. Mist hung over the water. We had a radio in there, but I didn’t listen to it.
I walked down the hill and sat on my concrete pillar. Vivian had spent much of the summer with her grandparents; it had been a few we
eks since I’d seen her. I was looking forward to having her again, but I felt too preoccupied to take much pleasure from the thought of it. From here, the approaching cars looked as if they were speeding toward me, then turning away just seconds before running me down. I felt as if I was narrowly escaping death over and over again, and I found this exhilarating.
When the bus pulled up, the roar of yelling children came with it. That sound—the pent-up, malevolent hilarity of schoolchildren—still made me uneasy. Poor Vivian was the last child off, stumbling after a pack of Darva Lawrence’s blond grandchildren, with her lunch box and tote bag and raincoat. It had rained all morning—for hours the rain trickled down the library windows—but now the sun was out and the air steamy and warm. Vivian was wearing a blue sweater with a steam engine on it, the sleeves pushed up past her elbows.
“Hey,” I said, holding out my hands for her things.
“Why do you say ‘hey’? You’re supposed to say ‘hi,’ or ‘hello.’ ”
“Well, all right. Hi!”
“Hello,” said Vivian.
She wouldn’t let me carry anything. We walked home across the grounds, Vivian making wide circles around the puddles.
Vivian had been an odd, funny-looking baby, and now she was an odd, funny-looking little girl. She had thick, small glasses and a peculiar way of laughing; she’d bare her teeth and roll her eyes and not make a sound. Her curly black hair was in two small pigtails, round as meatballs, over her ears. I was finding it difficult to slip back into Vivian-mode; everything I said to her felt stiff and inappropriate.
She told me her new teacher was named Miss Strunk and that she had to sit next to a boy she didn’t like.
“Why don’t you like him?”
“He’s mean. He shakes my chair.”
“Shakes your chair?”
“Like this.” She pantomimed a mean boy shaking a chair. “Then I almost fall out.”
“Sounds to me like he likes you.”
She grimaced, showing her small gapped teeth. “I don’t think so,” she said.
Back at the house I got her a snack, a plastic tumbler of grape juice and some squares of cheddar cheese. Ron was in the kitchen with nothing on but a pair of boxer shorts, grinding herbs with a mortar and pestle. “I don’t know how you can drink that stuff,” he said to Vivian.
“I like it,” she said, gulping her juice.
He shook his head. “It tastes funky to me.”
“Funky?” I said.
He picked up his mortar and poured the gray powder onto a sheet of paper. “You know what I mean. Just…funky. Rotten. Like someone made it in the dark.” Ron was obsessed with food. He was like a person on a perpetual starvation diet, which I suppose he was. He was always drinking brothy things he called “infusions” and trying to get me to taste them. You could not eat a thing in our kitchen without fielding a comment from Ron. I wanted to ask him about his beaver pelt but could not come up with a good way to broach the subject.
“I like it,” said Vivian again, kicking her heels against the table legs.
“That’s good. I’m glad everyone’s different,” Ron said.
This was one of my favorite times of day: afternoon light filling the kitchen, and no one in a hurry to do anything. For several minutes the only sounds were Vivian’s rhythmic kicking, the scrape of the pestle, and someone’s distant wind chime. I wiped the toast crumbs off the counter and emptied the draining rack of dishes.
“I don’t like the name Strunk,” said Vivian after a while. “It makes me think of a skunk.”
She told us how they were going to be studying Indians in the third grade, and that Miss Strunk told the class that she would try to see if they could go on a field trip to the excavation by the lake.
“But maybe not. She wants to make sure it’s an Indian first.”
Ron took an apple from the refrigerator and began chomping on it. “That doesn’t sound very respectful to me,” he said. “When I pass over, I won’t want a busload of third-graders walking all over my bones.”
“Would we walk on bones?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“You might,” said Ron. “But if I were your mom, I wouldn’t sign the permission slip, I can tell you that.”
This conversation was making me tense. Though I had my back to him, I could sense Ron looking at me. Lately, he’d been giving me long, appraising glances. It gave me the impression that since he was almost done renovating the house, he needed a new project, and would like very much to renovate me.
“You know,” said Ron, “you two have a lot in common.”
Vivian looked up at me, then back down at her plate of cheese cubes. “We both have brown hair.”
“That’s true. But I was thinking that you’re both only children. You don’t have brothers or sisters. That’s unusual.”
“It’s not so unusual,” I said.
“Actually, it is. I can’t think of anyone else, off the top of my head. I have four sisters, Jenny has a sister and a brother…”
“My mother says one is more than enough,” said Vivian, proudly.
“It must be lonely though. I’d be.”
“I’m never lonely,” I said. This was true, I believed, but it had come out more vehemently than I intended. I sounded defensive, as if he had hit a sore spot, which he had not.
“Never?” asked Ron.
“Not really.” I turned to Vivian. “Homework time. Hop to it. I know you have some.”
“I wish I had a sister,” she sighed.
Her only homework, claimed Vivian, was handwriting. I cleared a place on the kitchen table for her, and Ron wandered off into the living room with his tall, murky beverage. While I drank my coffee and watched Vivian work, I felt myself sinking into something of a torpor. This state was caused not, I realized, by calmness or relaxation, but by panic: both my body and mind balked at the thought of discussing the skeleton with my mother over dinner. I wanted to close my eyes and slump to the floor. I found, however, that if I sipped my coffee at perfectly regular intervals I could keep panic from overtaking me, and thus remained upright.
When she was done with her cursive A’s—she had to start over twice, because her vigorous erasing tore holes in the cheap paper Elaine bought her—Vivian showed them to me. They were heavy and dark and misshapen: chains pulled from a sunken ship. But every single one was there.
“Good job,” I told her, raising a leaden hand to pat her head.
“Thank you.” Her bangs stood up from her forehead like a row of fuzzy trees.
Vivian sat in front of the television while I did a crossword puzzle and watched the clock hands creep inevitably toward six.
At a quarter to, I gathered Vivian’s things and we walked to my mother’s house. Dark clouds were beginning to pile up in the sky, but down below the air was still and clear as a block of glass. Most of the time I found it difficult to see Train Line objectively—the shabby houses and giant trees were more familiar to me than my own face, and I overlooked their flaws as I did my own—but with Vivian’s hand in mine I saw the world frankly: the broken picket fences, the plastic sheeting tacked up in place of storm windows, the garish, brightly colored spheres that sat on pedestals in so many front yards. My mother had a red sphere in hers. It shone like a giant planet among the weeds and broken bird feeders. As we passed it, Vivian reached her hand out but stopped just short of touching it.
Sometimes, when I looked at Vivian, I would think it was a good thing I didn’t have my own child, because my own child wouldn’t be Vivian and would therefore disappoint me.
We arrived at my mother’s house to find her in an ebullient mood. She wore a tight, flamingo-colored dress and had piled her hair on top of her head. Sweat beaded her upper lip.
“Come, come,” she said, ushering us into the kitchen. “Your timing is impeccable. I’ve just pulled the chicken from the oven. My, Naomi, you look nice this evening.”
A slow blush moved up my neck and into my cheek
s. I didn’t, in fact, look nice. I hadn’t washed my hair in several days, and I was wearing a sweatshirt with bleach stains on it. Was she trying to be sarcastic? I couldn’t tell. My mother’s good moods could be more bewildering than her bad ones.
But at dinner she was solicitous and polite, and she didn’t mention the skeleton, so I began to relax. I asked her about her radio show.
“You mean,” she said, “is it still canceled? Yes, it is, for now.” She gave me an energetic smile.
“For now?”
“Mmm.”
I didn’t press it. Instead we chatted with Vivian about school, and then I found myself telling her about the strange dream I’d had the night before, with the train and the old man. She listened attentively, then said, “Well, that’s about Jenny Butler, of course.”
“What do you mean? How?”
“Haven’t you heard? She’s sick. Everyone knows that, but it’s worse than we thought. She found out last week.” My mother was far more plugged into Train Line gossip than I was, and she didn’t always think to pass it on to me, which was slightly frustrating. Her best friend was a medium named Darva Lawrence, who had bleached-blond hair, a smoker’s cough, and sometimes, fake eyelashes. She was always materializing at my mother’s back door, loaded down with info.
“Found out what?”
My mother raised her eyebrows—which were plucked into thin, penciled fermatas—and gestured toward Vivian, who was distractedly prodding her potatoes with her finger, then mouthed a word at me. It looked like dander.
Dander? I mouthed back.
Can-cer, she repeated.
Oh.
“What kind?”