The Memento

by Christy Ann Conlin

  Margaret pushed through the gate. It creaked and Art jumped. We followed her. That’s what children do. They follow, even when they know they shouldn’t. There were stone benches, the remains of garden beds and a marble bird feeder. Lupins were growing around the edges and the Melissa Blue butterflies were flitting about, more petal than insect.

  There were dusty blinds and sheer yellowed curtains in the windows. “Which room did he do it in?” Margaret looked at the far end.

  I pointed. “In there. That was the entertainment room for the patients. He was hanging from the middle of the room where the light was.” My heart was pounding thinking about it. It was a warm spring afternoon and the lilacs were all in bloom, and the lily of the valley. They had all those flowers at his funeral.

  “Is that so?” Margaret laughed. “Chandelier Charlie. Maybe they should make it a hotel and call it that, Chandelier Charlie’s.” Margaret laughed like a maniac and she licked her lips as though she was trying to savour her own chortles.

  Art was staring at his feet.

  “If anyone catches you talking that way, Margaret, they’ll ship you right back down to the valley and your daddy, so you best think on things. You shouldn’t talk that way about the dead. They wouldn’t like it.” I didn’t know why I said that. The words just come out of my mouth.

  Margaret held her breath then, just for a moment, and she tossed her hair. “Well, I didn’t mean anything by it. He couldn’t have been much of a man, my father says. Leaving his family behind.”

  “Well Mr. Charlie died and there ain’t nothing we can do about it, and talking bad don’t make it better.”

  Margaret’s voice was low. “Did they see him hanging there? Who found him?”

  Art’s eyes stayed on his feet. “We shouldn’t talk about it. It’s not respectful.”

  “Jenny and her grandmother found him. And then I came in … and then Art. The door was open. We went in to play. We would sneak in. Jenny was first there. The rope was long. He was dangling there, the tips of his toes on the floor, like he was going to start dancing. Charlie’s face was purple and black.” I wanted to scare Margaret, and Art knew it.

  “Fancy! We shouldn’t be talking about it. It’s not right.”

  Margaret wasn’t smiling any more. “That’s no story for a girl your age to be telling, Fancy Mosher. It’s disgusting. I don’t believe either of you were there.” She took a step back from us.

  I thought she was going to cry and it made me feel powerful. I wasn’t myself. “Well, then, you shouldn’t go asking, Margaret. Jenny says this place is haunted, that Charlie comes out at night, looking for who hung him there.” I was making that up now, to scare Margaret. Art hated it when people made stuff up, but of course he was thinking now that maybe this might be true.

  “Well, there was no one to blame but himself. Maybe Charlie comes back now, looking for himself.” Margaret laughed, but we didn’t laugh back and she stopped. She pulled her bangs down. “Maybe someone strung him up in there. To get his fortune. Maybe Estelle did it.”

  “Marigold owns the whole lot of it so I guess that didn’t work out for too good her.” I thought about the picture Grampie did of Mr. Charlie. He was pointing his finger in it, maybe judging those looking at the painting. Grampie saw him. I knew that now, and Art did too. It’s why Marigold was never the same, knowing Charlie knew something. Something he told to Grampie.

  Art’s voice was the lowest I ever heard it in my life. “We should go back and see if Loretta needs us. I’ve got to be getting home soon. I have to help my grandmother with supper.”

  That was when I noticed one of the windows was open just a crack. They saw it too.

  “I thought you said no one goes in there,” Margaret said.

  “Loretta must have done that. For air circulation. There’s black mould. It can infect your brain.” I didn’t know if that was true but it come easy off my tongue, like I was protecting the place from Margaret, or Margaret from Petal’s End … I couldn’t tell which. Margaret wanted no part of it and that was probably wise, but Art and I, we were already deep within the world of Petal’s End, too far in to get out.

  “You know, at Bible School they said your family has the devil in them. That’s what the ministers say, Fancy.”

  I understood later that Margaret was mean when she was afraid, but at that time it caught me off guard.

  It brought out the same in Art, anger caked on top of his fear. “There’s no need to talk to Fancy like that, Margaret. She’s just a kid.”

  “And what are you, a big man?”

  “You better be careful, Margaret. Maybe I can see things, you know, tell them what to do.” I kept looking at that window opened a crack. Charlie’s bowed head appeared in my mind, his face like crushed pansies.

  “I’m just teasing. You two can’t take a joke. You never could.” But Margaret was serious, her lips pulled in and twitching slightly.

  I ignored her and walked over to the Annex. Inside, I heard a low swishing from one of the windows.

  “Did you hear that?” I looked at Margaret.

  Margaret took a step back. “Hear what? You’re not funny, Fancy.”

  “Fancy?” Art’s voice was quiet.

  It started again. It wasn’t no joke any more. I looked at them at the top of the hill by the fence. I heard Margaret say, “Why is she acting that way, Art?”

  “I don’t know. You shouldn’t have brought us back here. You shouldn’t have made us talk about what happened to Jenny’s father. You have to do what you’re told here, Margaret. Fancy, let’s go.” Art was almost in tears.

  I heard it again, swish, swish, like the curtains were blowing. But there was no breeze. The sound stopped again.

  “It’s probably Loretta. Or you’re imagining things,” Margaret said, her voice tense. She marched right down beside me, to show me how stupid she thought I was being. Her hands were shaking, and she rubbed them together while I stood there. I could have sworn she heard it too, but she was looking at me, and though she couldn’t hear it she knew I was not lying. I began whistling to make myself feel brave, and Margaret bolted and run up the hill screaming I was a freak who should be locked up.

  Art was calling after me to come back but I went right up to the window and put my eyes to the crack. I couldn’t make nothing out except for the white wall across the room. There was an overturned chair.

  “You’re whistling that song again, Fancy,” Art called out to me. He called again as the hair on my arms prickled up like needles in my flesh. If I was older would I have looked again?

  Something darted away from the window. It had been looking out at me. I opened my mouth to scream but nothing came out. There was no time of day I could hide from whatever set after me on my birthday, not morning, noon or night. I ran toward Art, and together we sprinted around to the kitchen door.

  Margaret had a cigarette in her jittery hand and was struggling to light it. “I hate this place already. Fancy, why did you do that? Why did you go act all psycho?”

  Just then Loretta come rushing out the door and Hector come loping over. “Mother of God, what the hell are you all up to? I could hear you all the way back by the cars even when I was hammering on metal.”

  “Yes, what’s the hollering out here for? Margaret, what is going on? You can’t be smoking back here when the Parkers come. It’s not proper. You have to obey the rules.” Loretta followed Margaret’s gaze in the direction of the Annex. She gave Art and me a severe look. “Hector, take Margaret back down to the valley. I’m sure she’s had enough for today. And we’ll have our hands full with the Parkers tomorrow, that’s all I know.” Loretta went back into the house.

  Hector laughed. “You kids can’t stop getting into trouble.” He looked at Margaret. “It’s not so bad working here, even if they’re trying to scare you off. Fancy and Art aren’t afraid of things most normal kids are. Though it might get scarier when the Parkers get here. I shouldn’t speak too soon. You haven’t met Jenny y
et.” He walked off to get the truck.

  Margaret blew a big smoke ring followed by two small ones right through it, some sort of peace offering. She needed us if she was going to make her job work here, or she’d be going right back to her father. Margaret acted like she was never scared but I could feel way underneath it all that she was. I didn’t know if I would be seeing the dead some day but I did know I could smell fear like Jake could smell a stranger.

  “Art, it was a fan, that’s all.”

  “Well it must have been some big fan to scare you like that, Fancy.”

  I didn’t tell him that when I was down by the window I felt a puff of air on my cheek, not wind from a fan. A breath, a putrid breath.

  Margaret gestured to my hands. “Look at you, Fancy. You’re covered in goosebumps and you’re shivering. I didn’t mean you had the devil in you. It’s just what other people say. I thought you should know.”

  “It’s chilly standing in the shade, that’s all, with the cool breeze,” I said. But there was no shade, you see, as we stood in the middle of the yard in late-afternoon sun. And not even breeze enough to stir the gossamer wings of the smallest blue butterfly.

  7.

  Down the Long Dark Hall

  ONLY THE sound of a breeze tickling the treetops came in the window screen of my bedroom. The air felt lifeless and each breath I took felt forced. My room was usually a comfortable, safe place in the dark, but that night nothing was the same. What had I been thinking going near the Annex with Margaret and Art? It was forbidden. I had always kept my word, but ever since Ma had come to school I was sneaking about, like she infected me.

  Loretta was right that I should just let it go. Grampie was an old Mountain man with curious ways, that’s all. But thinking about him made me want to cry, questioning every moment we spent together. Nothing about our lives at the Tea House was as I remembered. Grampie spent most of his time looking right at ghosts. While I was in the house making a cake. It was astonishing he could do it, and that he hid it. He was having tea with the dead while I was reading or filling the bird feeders or building a fort with Art in the woods. He would never have put me in danger … would he? He was trying to protect me, but not telling me had left me defenceless and alone. It was like there were two parts of me arguing that night in the oppressive air. Betrayal throbbed in my chest, but then a voice would remind me that Grampie hadn’t asked for the memento any more than I had. It was something he inherited. It was our bloodline. He’d hoped it would never get passed down, but Ma made sure it did. And so he tried to shield me. When people asked him why he was a painter, Grampie would put his hands in his pockets and rock on his toes before he replied. And when he replied he always said the same thing—it was beckoning, and he could either follow it, or spend the rest of his life trying to look the other way. Those were the choices.

  You can run but you can’t hide. Grampie would always tell me and Art that. I wondered if that was what Charlie was thinking when he walked into the room in the Annex with a piece of hemp rope in his hand. He would have taken the time to get the chair, to knot the rope. Was he humming to himself, keeping away the thought of what he was going to do? Or was he picturing it the whole time? Was he thinking he could run but he couldn’t hide, and the only way out was to hang himself? Did something beckon to him? That stupid Annex was a tomb for the past, keeping it dead and alive at the same time.

  It was awful for a young girl to be lying in a bed with her head jumbled up with such thoughts, but I was no typical young girl, as I’d recently been told. Maybe it was standing there in the dark beckoning to me right at that moment. I turned on my light fast so if it was leering at me it would be caught with its hand in the air. Nothing but walls with faded flowered paper. On my nightstand was the embroidery hoop with my pictorial of Marigold without a face as I’d pulled the stitches so I could redo it more cheerful. The small glass lamp, my tattered clothes on the chair, the worn Persian rug. I was compelled to get out of bed. If there was anything beckoning to me in the Annex, I would confront it. It was better than lying in bed waiting for it to come.

  I took the flashlight from the drawer in my bedside table. I went ever so quiet down, down, down the stairs, not making a creak, hearing Loretta snoring from far off through her door as I slipped my hand behind the painting and felt the key, the key I was not to touch.

  What I learned, you see, is this—what goes around comes skipping right back around because there ain’t no circle that don’t want to close. Such is its nature, and we cannot defy our nature, although we do try. Sitting on this verandah now, I know this as truth. And this is why you have come, even if you still linger out of sight.

  I thought of the story of the pirate who chopped the sailor’s head off, leaving the headless body to watch over his treasure, treasure you can only find on a full summer moon in silence, because uttering even one word will collapse the hole and you’ll never see what’s inside. That night I crept from my room I was silent, my twelve-year-old mind following that pirate’s rule of keeping quiet in the midnight hour.

  There was a long window just before the big door leading to the Annex. The moonlight was falling in through the pane, through the yellowed sheer curtains. The key went smooth into the lock. I turned the doorknob and pushed open the door with a squeak. I left the key in the lock and nudged it a crack more, squeezing my thin body through, noticing how my breasts got in the way, and I sucked in my breath to shrink them back, searching for my body of just a year ago, the body of a child. I stepped into the darkness of the long hall with the doors on either side all along to the end, the rooms all closed except the one at the far end, the door to the patients’ salon. The dank air was rife with mildew. They hadn’t sent the Happy Helpers in here to clean with any of Grampie’s turpentine and honey furniture polish or their lemon and orange oil and their lavender and vinegar window spray. The moonlight was spilling down the wall and over the floor at the end of the hall, as though it was trying to escape out of the room. I heard the vibrating again, the fan sound, but when I listened closer it was more like the breath of an angry little animal. I took a step. Oh, no, Fancy Mosher, go back, and keep your word about not sneaking. I took quick steps, one two three, then I was beside the moonlight on the floor. My own breathing, my foreign whistling in my ears, and then a soft whir. I inched further because I had given myself my word that I’d go and see what was in that room, and Grampie said you must stay true to your word.

  My feet were white in the moonlight, and my small fingers were slivers of cold marble. Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry. My lips made the shapes of the words. I was trying hard to whistle a familiar tune but I kept unwillingly returning to the melody I’d never heard before that summer. I was looking in the dark room and feeling the breeze from the fan, shivering, and I heard a slow, faraway singing, a thin voice falling into a whispery song. I couldn’t tell if it was far away in the room or far away in my head, and suddenly I was trying to whistle again, my lips pulling into a circle, but I couldn’t get air out. My lips moved like the mouth of a fish tossed on the dry dock, mindlessly opening and shutting. In the dark of the room there was a bridal veil and it was streaming out and words I could not understand were blowing from it.

  My fists squeezed tight and I felt the flashlight still in my hand and shone the thin beam in front of me. It was just a fan and the curtain blowing in on the wind. I shut the fan off and took a few gasps, bending over to calm myself. Composed, I stood up and tilted my head back, and there was the big hook in the ceiling where the chandelier had been. The rest was the same as when we’d found Charlie there. There were chairs all gathered round and a movie screen stand, waiting for a show that would never come again, an old movie projector on a shelf, some papers, a Tiffany lamp in the corner, a worn leather sofa and a rectangular mirror over it, reflecting my flashlight, and then suddenly a glimpse of a face, with white swirling around.

  I heard my name being called and I broke out of whatever stupor the room had me in and we
nt fast down the long creaking hall with my feet flying. I pulled the door open to the light and Loretta was there, waiting in her tented granny nightgown, what she called her nightdress, her arms folded, a big sigh, and the skeleton key I had left in the door lock now in her fingers. In my head was the blurred melody, the half-formed words of a song I couldn’t catch. There was something in there, and it had followed me from the Tea House, and that something had been peeking out the window earlier in the day, waiting. Loretta was protecting me, keeping whatever it was at arm’s length, for as long as Loretta was there it was possible to not quite fully believe that the dead would come singing. And as long as I did not believe so absolute and pure, they would be nothing more than hushed melodies and snatches of whispered words.

  8.

  The Arrival

  THE PARKERS was over two hours late. The sun was cooking our flesh. While we waited, Margaret complained how stupid it all was. She must have felt my eyes on her for she turned to face me. She took a step back.

  Loretta went inside to the kitchen, saying how the devil loved idle hands. She was worn out from being up in the night with me. All she said in the morning was no matter the trauma of my birthday I was to bear in mind the importance of keeping my word. Margaret went with Hector back to the carriage house.

  In the shade of the verandah I told Art about the new embroidery I was working on: Pomeline and Jenny playing in a meadow of daisies. I told him I might stitch me and him into it … a keepsake for Pomeline when she went off to the music conservatory in the autumn. He thought that was kind. Then I told him about the Annex. Art said he’d thought plenty about the matter and I should forget all about it. No one could see the dead, he lectured. We were twelve now and shouldn’t entertain superstitious stories. No disrespect to your Grampie, he added fast. But Art didn’t believe a word he was saying—he just wanted to believe. And wanting to believe’s not the same thing at all.