“Look what Jenny’s been up to,” I said. He shrugged. “She’s crazy, Art. That’s all there is to it. We’re living here with a crazy lady.”
“There’s no way she could have done this. Jenny can hardly get around with a cane. Maybe you did it.”
I couldn’t believe it. I slapped him right across the face and went running through the path of petals to the front door. I dashed up the staircase and down the hall and into Jenny’s bedroom. She sat up in bed wearing a black satin sleep-mask.
“Pomeline?” she cried out, trembling with fear. Jenny’s voice made me catch my breath. She lifted the mask up with one hand, the other groping for her thick glasses on her bedside table. She was like some newborn kitten without her glasses, all vulnerable, mewling. “Pomeline,” she whispered again, looking over at the door.
“It ain’t your dead sister. It’s Fancy Mosher.”
I would like to say relief come over her but it did not. I moved into the room and went over to Jenny, this trembly thing in the bed in her white cotton nightie. I knew then it wasn’t her who put them rose petals down. There was no way she could have got out of bed, gathered them up and scattered them about in the night just to scare me.
We were in such a state that when we heard footsteps coming closer we both shook uncontrollably. We stayed huddled up together until we saw Art in the doorway, and Jenny and I both started laughing. We kept laughing and laughing until Jenny’s weird giggles trailed off into a horrible veil of weeping and coughing that draped over the room. I moved to comfort her again, and didn’t she start screaming for us to get out and leave her alone to rot and die.
Art gestured to me and I followed him down the stairs. “She’s seriously ill. She’s making out she’s okay, but she’s not. She’s on powerful pain medication but I think she’s taking too much. It’s making it harder for her to breathe, and it’s messing with her mind. I don’t know what to do.” His cheek was red from where I slapped him. Art wasn’t no psychologist—he was just a young man trying to be a peacemaker.
“Well, I guess that means she’s got to stop pretending, don’t it, about what happened out there on the island? You can’t set the past straight when it’s twisted up in lies, and she’s running out of time.”
“You’re right, Fancy. And we’re not trying to hurt you. We’re trying to help you. Jenny’s got this idea in her head, but beyond that, she was trying to help you by bringing you here.”
The stress we had been bearing for twelve long years was causing this mayhem. That was what I arrived at in that moment—what happened on the island had damaged us beyond repair. Between the two of them they was making me crazy, Art acting like it was all resolved and, behind him, Jenny acting all creepy and wanting me to do her a séance. After a time I couldn’t come up with a single explanation except what I’d been avoiding—it really was Pomeline come back from the dead, set on getting hard, sharp and even … until we were all broken corpses just like her.
Jenny now spoke relentlessly of how Pomeline was in the house seeking reprisal. She pointed her finger at me, as we sat having cake on the verandah.
“You need to set things straight with her, Fancy Mosher.”
She and Art were drinking wine. It wasn’t taking much to get Jenny tipsy. And Art was drinking far more than normal. He’d been doing that the last few nights, when he gave up on settling Jenny down. He didn’t even lecture her about mixing her pills and alcohol, for if he did she’d just deny taking the medication.
“I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. At that, Art put his hand on the table and told me Jenny had found Grampie’s letter. This was what was fuelling her.
“I did find it,” Jenny said with a slur. “I did. I found it a few years ago when I was here by myself. I would drive myself out and stay the night. I went up to your room and looked through it. Granny kept repeating your name when she was in the nursing home. I wanted to know what she was going on about. When I came out here to go through her things, I found the embroidery you did for her. It’s upstairs in my room. I went searching for a reason my grandmother couldn’t forget you, and I found the letter. The twelfth-born Mosher can see the dead.”
“It’s not fucking true,” I screamed.
Art shook his head, back and forth and back and forth, like it was some fucking pendulum in one of them grandfather clocks all over this house. He started waxing on about the stress of the many tragic things that had befallen me.
“Tragic things happening to me? What about Jenny? What about you, Art Comeau? You was out on that island too.” His head stopped swinging, and he and Jenny shared a look, as they had been doing since I got there, like they had a new secret, not just the old one.
“I can hear the noises, and I can see the flowers and the petals, but I can’t see Pomeline,” Jenny said. “I can’t see her, but I can sense her. Only you can see. Only you can hear her words and talk to her. My grandmother deserved what she got, Fancy, and Pomeline knew what Granny did. Pommie was the one who found out, and she told me. Well, she didn’t tell me but I went looking.” I frowned, unsure where she was headed. “All those years pretending. Marigold was no better than my mother. She was worse, if that’s possible. There’s no end to the horrors in the well of evil. There are no tidings of comfort and joy, nothing to save us all. The only good one was Pomeline, but I was just a little girl and I didn’t understand. Children do not always understand that things are more complicated than they appear.”
I didn’t know what Jenny meant by all of that. We was just kids on that island, that was true. And children understood what lying could conjure. But I didn’t understand in the slightest what she meant about Marigold.
“Fancy, I’m so sorry. You have to forgive me, too. And you have to tell Pomeline that I’m sorry. She won’t listen to me. I’ve tried and I’ve tried. It’s my fault. But you and Art helped me.”
I wanted to wring her neck. Like we’d had any choice. She always had to have her own way, when she was twelve, and when she was twenty-four. Jenny was drunk, stoned and jabbering on. I asked her what Marigold did but she just kept bawling and bawling, that dreadful tearless weeping. Jenny held out her hands and Art took one. He gave me such a hard glance that, as angry as I was, I reached out and took the other one. Anything to wind her down. Her hands were cold and dry.
“You have to promise me you’ll sleep in the hall at the bottom of the stairs. My bedroom door must be shut at night. Pomeline’s in the house and she’s putting out the flowers and she’s going to come up the stairs and get me because of what we did. It was my fault. You just did what I told you to. All will be calm. All will be bright. Calm and bright.” She kept saying that over and over again with her eyes shut, her childhood religion welling up. A chill went through me for I thought of what she’d done, all those things she’d done, and pulled us into, and that maybe her childhood religion did have a power we had not ever taken seriously enough.
I could not stop myself from shaking. My thoughts kept drifting to the island, how I could not keep straight what had happened out there—what was truth and what was a lie. Jenny opened up those eyes. She could sense I was starting to believe, not in her, but in the memento. It was an affliction put upon me, just as Jenny was born into her illness. I was a twelfth-born, and my time had arrived.
We sat for a while, holding hands. Jenny’s breathing got slower. Her head teetered forward, all that wine and fear. She started snoring. Art put his hand on my shoulder, and when he felt me shivering still he put more pressure into his long strong fingers, and the heat of his skin sent tingles zinging through me. He carried Jenny up to her room and came back down to the verandah for me. He said he’d get blankets for us to sleep at the bottom of the stairs, so we could tell her we’d kept our word. He went off and I cleaned up the dishes. When the kitchen was respectable I went to join him.
I heard a creaking and my bones froze, a chair rocking back and forth outside. I looked out the window—Art in a porch rock
er with a glass of wine. I opened up the window and told him he’d scared me. He asked wasn’t I scared worse opening up the window and letting more hobgobblies in? I laughed, but then shut it tight. I walked over to the table and poured myself a glass of wine and I drank it right down. I knew it was wrong but that did not stop me, it did not, and I took the bottle out onto the verandah and sat beside Art and poured myself another glass. A glow come over me, and it was as though life was going to be okay again, and it seemed the summer sky that late at night was happy for me, streaks of orange and pink mixed in with the stars coming through. A few bats darted by.
After a few glasses, we went in, giddy like children, lying in our fort of mats and blankets Art had arranged on the floor. A longing for Art went through me, and him being my childhood friend fell away. He was a man, and I wanted him on top of me and inside of me, his smell and marks on my body, protecting me from whatever had come to call at Petal’s End. A desperate animal come out in us both. Art grabbed me, and his lips and hands were all over my body, and he was whispering how he’d wanted to do this for years. As my eyes squeezed shut and the swirling nighttime sky surged into my mind I heard something else breathing. Art lunged forward on me one last time before he collapsed. Shush, I whispered and he held his breath but the noise was still there. We sat up, naked and slick with sweat. I saw a flash of white at the top of the stairs. He didn’t see it, he said.
I went naked up the stairs, quietly down the hall, but Jenny’s door was closed up tight. At the bottom of the staircase Art stood at a window he’d opened for some air. He shut it before I could say a word and we lay down on the floor in our burrow of blankets. I realized how drunk I was. My head was spinning as I lurched off into oblivion.
A pounding head and nauseous stomach woke me to the grey light of the early morning. All the windows were open, and on the table in the hall was a huge vase of lilies. My gasp woke Art. I covered my body. The shame was coming over me just as the fear was. Jenny must have done all this. She must have seen us. Art shook his head, reminding me there was no way she could have, not as sick as she was. We wrapped our bodies together and he stroked my face, and in time he carried me up the stairs to my room. I was too sick to do a thing but fall back asleep.
When I came down later there was a note. He’d taken Jenny to the hospital. She had woken at noon in severe pain. He’d told her I was feeling poorly and they’d let me sleep, and would call from the hospital. There was no lilies by the door. The previous night felt like a dream, except for how sticky I was between my legs, and the smell of our sex so thick I could taste it.
I had a bath and went off in the wildwood where we used to pick blackberries. They was still growing, succulent and dark on stiff canes, protected by thick sharp needles, which kept pricking and stinging my wrists and fingers. It seemed the blackberries were plotting against me and I knew I was not in my right mind. A simple routine would ground me, I decided, so I returned with my bucket half full. From afar the house seemed like a dollhouse, getting bigger as I approached, out of proportion, and looming over me as though it had risen up from a grave. I could not trust anything, least of all myself.
I was the only one in the mansion but it did not feel empty. I did my chores, whistling, and made a blackberry pie. But I could not shake the feeling the house was alive. I rode Art’s bike down to the village as fast as I could, to have a break from Petal’s End. The lane was quiet and the village was thick with fog. I could barely make out the bridge, and could not get even a glimpse of the beach, but the air was fresh and salty and it invigorated me. I had been hidden away for too long. This was the problem. It had been weeks that I’d been sealed away behind the trees.
I pedalled back with a clear mind and fell asleep on the verandah, until I was startled awake by singing. I couldn’t tell if it was my voice, if I was singing in my sleep, and maybe it was me who was cutting flowers and putting down petals, and letting night air in, me that was invoking the dead. Or maybe we were all cracked. I shook my head, still full of hazy images, only I knew they weren’t dreams, or at least I thought I did. My memories were colliding into each other. Perhaps I was indeed going insane. This was how it happened—where lies became truth and truth lies, where a memory was nothing more than a made-up story we told ourselves. A deceit we could live with, or live with long enough until it made us sick. Haunted or crazy, they’d never let Melissa come back.
I thought of the letter from Grampie, how he said the dead would find me if I was willing. That they come for truth, a truth the living keep entombed. That didn’t make no sense to me as a child of twelve … until the summer Pomeline died, and we took our oath on that godforsaken island, and our corruption took form. I was peering through a window in my mind, back to when I was barefoot and thin with wild long hair and pink cheeks, when we did not know better even when we should have. An overwhelming desire to see the truth came over me for I wanted to be free. I fell to my knees beseeching Holy Mother Mercy to forgive us for what we had done.
8.
The Island
WE DID go to the island that day after Marigold had her fall during the concert in the gazebo. Jenny did look to her grandmother, and over to me, watching fixedly as Marigold’s foot went through the wooden floor, in the spot where Pomeline was supposed to stand for the bow. Jenny’s expression changed, the flushed fury flooding in as she watched her Granny fall while Pomeline sat at the piano in all her diminished beauty—her sister who had arrived at Petal’s End vivacious and elegant. Jenny clenched her fists, and it seemed she would plunge them into her own face for a moment, as though she had failed and had to be punished. Instead, she let her arms fall and she stood mouthing her strange prayers. Jenny reached out and took my hand. I was afraid to let go. Art glanced at me. We both knew—Jenny had loosened the floorboard.
Hector knew, too. She’d come to him for a hammer, he told me when we were married. A hammer to make a dollhouse, she’d told him, for pounding nails in, not pulling them up with the clawed end. I don’t think Pomeline suspected the trap was for her. She had rushed to her grandmother’s aid, even though the old lady was so cold toward her. There had been such tumult, and more came as the smoke rolled up from Hector’s secret meadow. He took Jenny’s secrets to jail with him because he was afraid of her. Art and I were afraid of her too as we stood in our finery in the gazebo.
Estelle saw the island as a place we could be contained, exiled to, while she took command of Petal’s End. We hoped Jenny would stay behind, that her mother would say she was too frail to come to the island, but Estelle was busy taking over the estate. She was worried the garden party catastrophe would send Jenny into an apoplectic fit. But Estelle was a fool, and that would be her undoing. Frailty in the body don’t mean frailty in the mind.
We went out on the boat. That part is true. We were glad Harry and Sakura had taken us away from the calamity of Petal’s End, our unusual summer ending fittingly in such an upheaval of screams and smoke and sirens. Loretta and Dr. Baker were just as glad for us to be sent off for a few days. Harry was an expert outdoorsman, a veteran explorer, and he and Sakura had camped all over the world. What could possibly happen to us? You see, that was the wrong question. It was not what could happen. It was what we could do.
The boat headed north in the bay. We did not turn back once to look at the mainland. Pomeline was behaving strangely. She had slowly dimmed as the weeks had passed, her pink cheeks turning grey, as though a disease was taking hold. She was seasick on the boat. All that is true, and we did not deceive ourselves about this. Pomeline alternated two looks that day, either terrible sad or strangely content.
As I remember this my thoughts push me through the window in my mind and I am back there, on the boat, seeing again what really happened that day.
Pomeline is staring down the bay, the afternoon sun twinkling bright on the waves. I don’t know how she can stand to look. Purify, as Jenny would say, the blazing purification of the sun. Holy, holy, holy. She’s been repe
ating that all morning. Art and I haven’t spoken a word to her. I prefer not to look at Jenny for I see Marigold staring at me instead. She keeps her hands folded together. I keep hoping she learned her lesson, that when you set a trap you sometimes get the wrong thing caught in it.
Art asked me how I was while we waited at the wharf as they loaded our camping gear. We heard the adults talking about Hector—he would be in prison for a long time. Jenny slid over and said Hector got what he deserved, and we shouldn’t feel bad. Art told her he didn’t want to be no part of her games or her secrets or lies and he walked away. Hurt rippled across Jenny’s face and was gone as quick as it come. Then we were on the boat. Norman Reilly took us out, a silver-haired man from a big family of fishermen, and his first mate, his eldest son. Norman knew my Grampie. He nods when I go by.
Sakura reassured us that we are not to blame—time would pass and the memory would fade, she said. The gulls cry overhead as they follow the boat. Even in the mist we know the water is calm and the boat glides onward.
The engine is cut. Harry is standing at the side looking into the fog and he calls out to the captain. “What’s going on? Why have we stopped? Is there a problem? Are we lost?”
Norman is looking into the mist.
“What’s he looking for? Is there a whale? Mechanical problem?” Harry speaks in a strained voice. He don’t want no more worries, no more accidents. I know why we are stopped.
He keeps looking at me and his alarm makes me feel queasy so I hold up my finger to my lips. “Shhhh,” I say. “He’s listening for the island.”
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