A Sudden Light: A Novel

by Garth Stein

  For these many years I’ve waited. I’ve kept my faith. I’ve always believed he would return and I would see him again. So I was not surprised when he appeared. Instead, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of contentment and satisfaction.

  In my room, the sun in the window, a glass of port by my side, I was making an accounting of what I have done: a ledger sheet that showed lives I have destroyed and forests I have ravaged, against donations of money and land I have made, institutions and cities I have helped, as well as individual grants to those less fortunate than me. Ben taught me that what I have carved from the earth is not for me to keep, but for me to return to the earth. I was making my accounting as the afternoon sun flickered through the needles of the trees and upon my ceiling, and I looked up to the window, which looked out upon Ben’s tree, and he was there in the room with me.

  “Ben,” I whispered. “Such a sight for a dying man. You have come for me. Does it mean I am forgiven? Does it mean I am not beyond redemption?”

  Ben knelt beside my chair and I reached for him. I touched him.

  “Have I redeemed myself, Ben?”

  “You have.”

  “I have prayed for it to be so.”

  “It is not in prayer, but in deeds that we find absolution,” he said to me.

  “Do you accept my compromise?” I asked him, referring to the trust I had put into place to allow Abraham and his heirs to continue living at Riddell House. “I didn’t want to break my promise to you—”

  “You have kept your promise to me.”

  “But the estate. The park—”

  “The promise is mine, Father. It’s a promise I made to Harry, and the obligation belongs to me. You were just holding my promise until it was time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “Time for you to be released,” Ben said.

  “Am I released?”

  “You are,” he said. “I will stay now, until I fulfill my promise to Harry.”

  He left me then, but I didn’t feel alone.

  I must go downstairs now to rest. I will sleep better than I have slept in my entire life, for I know that I have lived my life rightly. I have made mistakes and I have hurt people, I do not deny that fact. But I have corrected those mistakes vigorously once I understood the error of my ways.

  I must go downstairs to find Thomas, my faithful friend. He will help me to bed, for I am tired and require a nap.

  The cook is braising a rabbit for us tonight, which I love very much, and look forward to eating.

  Elijah Riddell died a hero. I read his death notice in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 12, 1916. The banner headline was A CITY, A NATION, MOURNS DEATH OF ICON. Front page, above the fold.

  The same man who had been skewered by the press twenty years earlier for all the cynical, shark-like deals he made. The man vilified for destroying entire forests, ruthlessly shutting down towns and schools, and treating his workers and their families with no mercy at all. By the time he died, he had redeemed himself to some degree, at least.

  Enough to be forgiven by his son.

  – 43 –

  THE TRUTH WILL OUT

  At 3:02 A.M., I heard voices. It was not unusual. Nothing was unusual in Riddell House.

  I went downstairs to investigate and found Grandpa Samuel with a glass of medicine. Sitting across from him at the table was my father, also with a glass of medicine. They were talking about boats or wood or something. They were talking about the house or Isobel or Serena. They were talking about the wind that came from the southwest, from the Pacific Ocean, raced through the mouth of the Columbia River and around the Olympics, bringing in the rain. They were talking about trees.

  “Are we being too loud?” my father asked when he saw me in my pajamas, standing sleepily in the doorway rubbing my eyes.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I lied.

  “Join the club,” he said jovially, indicating a seat.

  I wondered if I should join them. I wasn’t sure it was right. But then I saw the liquor jiggling in the bottle and realized they were in full swing and wouldn’t mind my company. I grabbed a Coke from the fridge, took a glass from the cupboard, and sat at the table. My father topped off Grandpa Samuel’s glass.

  “Maybe a little less milk this time,” Grandpa Samuel said.

  “Good idea,” my father agreed.

  And then we toasted. The three of us. Grandpa Samuel, who seemed to be carrying on his own conversation in his head, nodded vehemently.

  “I should have been the one to do it,” he said.

  “But you didn’t do it, Dad,” my father said. “And it had to be done. So I did it.”

  “You should have let me do it,” Grandpa Samuel protested.

  “But you didn’t do it.”

  “No.”

  “So I did it. It had to be done.”

  “It had to be done,” Grandpa Samuel agreed after a sip of his medicine.

  They drank again, and refilled, and I knew they were rocked.

  “So why did you send me away, then?” my father asked his father. “You at least owe me an explanation. Why?”

  “I couldn’t do it.”

  “Then why did you send me away?”

  Grandpa Samuel nodded his drunken nod, but didn’t reply.

  I knew what they were talking about, and I remembered Serena’s talk about emasculation. That was why Grandpa Samuel sent my father away. You can’t take away someone’s manhood like that.

  “You banished me,” my father said. “You told me you never wanted to see me again. Why?”

  Grandpa Samuel ruminated. Ideas swimming in his head.

  “Ben is nervous,” he said.

  My father shook his head in confusion and looked at me.

  “Ben is here?” I asked.

  “Ben is always here.”

  “What about Isobel?” my father asked. “Is she always here?”

  Grandpa Samuel was silent for a moment, then he spoke: “When she dances, she’s here.”

  “But not usually?”

  “Not usually,” he said. “But Ben . . . he’s nervous.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  Grandpa Samuel looked at me with milky eyes. His seeping eyes and his sagging face and the whiskers that bristled on his cheeks and eyebrow hairs that were so long, and his long white hair, and his T-shirt that Serena had put out for him, his twisted black T-shirt that said: FUCK MEAT.

  Fuck meat.

  It was like a haiku. So simple and yet so complex. Ezra Pound might have translated it from the Chinese.

  “It made me sick to look at him,” Grandpa Samuel said to me. “She wanted me to do it, but I couldn’t, so she asked Jones. After he’d done it, I couldn’t look at him without feeling sick.”

  “Dad, I’m right here. You can talk to me.”

  “I knew I would poison him if he stayed. He would be infected by my sickness. I didn’t want him to live his life hating me for hating him.”

  “Dad,” my father tried to interrupt, frustrated that Grandpa Samuel was speaking only to me and not to him. “Say it to me!”

  “I failed my son,” Grandpa Samuel said to me. “I failed Isobel. I failed my father.”

  Grandpa Samuel fell silent, as did we all. After a moment, he reached for the bottle of medicine, but my father stopped him and took the bottle himself.

  “No more medicine for you,” my father said. “We’re going to get you off this medicine.”

  My father stood up and put the bottle away in the cupboard.

  “We’ll find you a doctor and get your diagnosis sorted out and figure out what you really need.”

  He closed the cupboard, and, as he passed Grandpa Samuel, the old man reached out and grabbed his son’s wrist, stopping him. They met eyes.

  “Will you forgive me, Son? I didn’t mean to hurt you. I meant to protect you. I was wrong in what I did. I beg you. Please forgive me.”

  My father still wore a hard look on his face; he was not disposed to forgive
anything. But he looked at me, his own son, and I nodded significantly.

  “I forgive you,” my father said.

  And that was all it took. Grandpa Samuel burst into a sobbing bout that was truly impressive. Slobbering and snot and waterworks. The whole deal. My father touched the back of Grandpa Samuel’s head. Father leaned into son and they embraced, more or less. A quasi, rigid embrace, and I knew there had been some kind of closure between them, though the wound was so deep, the scar of it would always show.

  I left them there in the kitchen; they didn’t need me anymore. I went upstairs to my room, and, from the second-floor landing, I could hear a faint shuffling sound coming from the ballroom. Isobel . . .

  Quietly, so quietly, I slunk up the stairs to the second floor, and down the hallway to my room. I grabbed my flashlight and then I slipped up the stairs to the third floor. On the landing, in the antechamber of the ballroom, I paused. The double doors to the ballroom were closed, but I clearly heard footsteps and music coming from inside. I reached for the doorknob. I turned it gently so it made nary a click. I pushed the door open and peered through the crack. And there she was.

  How elegant. How lovely. A young woman with her hair up, wearing a long brown dress that billowed and fluttered as she spun on her bare feet. My grandmother. And though it was dark in the room save the moonlight trickling in the windows, though it was hard to see, I was almost sure I recognized those feet. I never had thought of myself as a foot fetishist, but perhaps I had some of that in me, because I knew those feet. And I was pretty sure the toenails were painted orange.

  “Serena,” I whispered so softly, almost inaudibly, but loud enough for the dancing woman to hear. She looked to the door, then fluttered across the room toward the stage. I rushed into the room and flipped on the light switches. They didn’t work.

  The ghost floated around the room and then vanished. I clicked on my flashlight and scanned the dance floor. She was gone. I crossed to the phonograph and clicked it off. And then I heard other sounds. Scratching sounds. I went to the closet with the dumbwaiter shaft and listened closely. I heard grunting, followed by pounding, followed by a scratching, clawing sound. I didn’t dare open the door.

  I ran down the stairs to the first floor, past my father and grandfather, through the kitchen, and outside to the fuse box. As I guessed, the same glass fuse was unscrewed; I tightened it. I returned to the kitchen.

  “Dad,” I said. “You need to come now.”

  He rose from his chair immediately.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Grandpa Samuel also started to get up.

  “Wait here, Grandpa,” I said.

  “Wait here,” my father agreed. “We’ll be right back.”

  I led my father up to the ballroom; the light switch worked.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Isobel,” I said. “She was here and she ran into the closet. I trapped her.”

  We went to the closet door and opened it. The closet was empty.

  “How do you trap a ghost?” my father asked.

  “She’s not a ghost,” I said. “She’s Serena.”

  I shone my flashlight into the back of the closet, where the hatch was located.

  “That’s a dumbwaiter shaft,” I explained to my father. “It goes all the way down to the basement, and it stops on the second floor; maybe there’s a hatch on the first floor, too, but I haven’t found it. I took the shaft down to the basement when I hit my head. I figured Serena was behind the dancing footsteps, so after dinner, I nailed the door shut. When I came up just now to investigate, I saw her run in here. I heard her trying to pry the hatch open. It has to be Serena.”

  My father grabbed my flashlight and stepped into the closet. He shone the light against the back wall as he knelt in front of the hatch and looked closely.

  “There’s blood on the wall,” he said.

  He felt the wall with his hand, found something, and pulled it away.

  “A fingernail,” he said.

  He held it up for me to see; it was a fingernail, torn from the quick of a finger. It belonged to Serena.

  * * *

  We found her in the bathroom of the servant’s wing, a box of Band-Aids spilled open on the counter before her amid scraps of paper wrappers and discarded backing strips. She was meticulously applying Band-Aids to her fingertips, pulling them so tight.

  My father and I stood in the doorway for a long time before she noticed, such was her level of concentration. When she looked up, we could see makeup streaked on her face from tears, and blood on her forehead and cheeks from pushing hair from her face with the backs of her bloodied hands.

  “They’ll take forever to grow back,” she said with a sad laugh.

  “How long have you been pretending to be Mom?” my father demanded.

  Serena sniffed and laughed. “Forever,” she said, pushing past us and moving into the common area. “Forever and for always.”

  My father hovered behind her, but Serena wouldn’t meet his eyes. She paused by the kitchen table, setting a hand down to steady herself. She smoothed her dress, straightened her hair, corrected her posture, all in an effort to compose herself. She looked straight at my father and said: “I’m ready to take your questions.”

  “Why did you do it?” my father asked, still fixed on her.

  “To please Daddy,” she replied. “Why else?”

  “Why did you need to please Daddy?”

  “When you left, he was distraught. Mother had died; you had killed her . . .”

  I glanced at my father; it was slight, but I saw the nick from Serena’s blade.

  “She was gone,” Serena continued. “And then you were gone. And Daddy was distraught, because he had only me, and I wasn’t good for anything, was I? I was eleven years old: a child. It was only Daddy and me and Riddell House with its creaks and leaks and the history of its pain painted into the walls. You can feel it, can’t you, Trevor? It’s in the walls. It’s in the foundation.”

  She looked at me, and I nodded.

  “I can feel it.”

  “And one night I danced,” she said, crossing over to the couch and sitting down expansively, entirely in control of her narrative. “I could really use a fucking cigarette right now. Trevor, be a dear and fetch Aunt Serena’s cigarettes, won’t you?”

  She indicated a cupboard door, and I looked inside. A pack of Marlboros, an ashtray, and a lighter. I brought them to her. She took a cigarette, lit it, and inhaled deeply.

  “Don’t be corrupted by my negative influence,” she said to me, exhaling smoke into the air. “Smoking will kill you. I could really use a fucking drink right now.”

  “Serena,” my father said sternly. “Why did you need to dance to please Daddy?”

  “One night I was thinking of you, Brother Jones. I remembered what it was like to dance with you, when Mother was so sick that to move her hand or scratch her nose was agony for her. And you and Daddy would carry her up the stairs to the ballroom. I knew how painful it was for her, but she wanted to see us dance. And we danced, didn’t we, Brother Jones? We danced. ‘It was a time,’ as Daddy would say. And one night, when the house was empty because you and Mother had left, I went up to the ballroom to dance with you, even though you weren’t here. I was eleven years old, and I played records and danced because I couldn’t sleep for the loneliness. The following morning Daddy said to me: ‘Did you hear the footsteps last night?’ He said: ‘Isobel is dancing for me.’ And he was so happy. He was so happy that she had come to dance for him that I did it again and again, and I kept doing it. Don’t you see, Brother Jones? It wasn’t a lie; it was a different truth.”

  An uncomfortable silence settled upon us.

  “I thought—” my father began, but stopped himself.

  “There are many truths, Brother Jones,” she said. “There are an infinite number of universes, all existing side by side, or so the scientists say. All existing concurrently. But we have only this universe in
which to live; we can’t have the other universes. Of all the glorious universes we could possibly have, this is the universe we’re stuck with.”

  My father tried to digest her words. He wanted to understand. But he didn’t seem able.

  “I believed,” he said. “I believed.”

  “And what’s wrong with believing?” Serena asked him. Serena pleaded with him. “Brother Jones, I want to know. What’s wrong with hoping? What’s wrong with wanting something so badly you can’t stand it? What’s wrong with wanting something so much, you’ll do anything to get it?”

  “I don’t know,” my father said after a moment. He dropped down on the couch across from his sister. He closed his eyes, lifted his face to the heavens, and reached his arms out for the sky. “I don’t know.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with believing,” she said. She got up from her couch. She moved over to stand before him, and she looked down on his raised face, his eyes still closed; she hovered over him. “And we can still believe. I have tickets. I have a stateroom reserved for us. On the Queen Elizabeth II. A voyage around the world! Think of it. I’ve never left here. I’ve hardly been off The North Estate. Brother Jones, you and I will sail around the world!”

  She lowered herself and knelt beside him on the couch, next to him, up against him.

  “Sail around the world,” he repeated from his rapturous pose.

  She held her face over his, then she kissed him. He accepted her kiss for a moment, but then he snapped to, like coming out of a hypnotic trance. He grabbed her wrists, sat up, and shook his head.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  “It’s all right, Brother Jones,” she soothed.

  “You were kissing me. Why were you kissing me?”

  “I wasn’t—”

  He stood up, and, as he did, he twisted Serena’s wrists in a way that made her gasp in pain.

  “You’re hurting me—”

  “What were you doing?” he shouted at her. “Don’t do that again! Don’t you ever touch me like that again!”

  “Please let go!” she cried. “You’re hurting me!”