by Nathan Hill
She sits again on the merry-go-round. “Come back,” she says.
“I don’t want to talk about it, Faye.”
He is an even-keeled boy, mild and modest; he must have frightened himself, reacting the way he did. And now he is trying to make it go away, to erase what happened. Faye sits on the merry-go-round and says, “It’s okay, Henry.”
“No, it’s not,” he says, his back to her, hands pocketed, shoulders hunched up. He is a closed fist, all tense and curled in on himself. “It’s just…You can’t do that.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not right,” he says, and she considers this. Picks off red flakes of rust and listens to his feet crunching the sand as he paces and she stares at his back and finally says: “Why?”
“You shouldn’t want to. It’s not what a girl like you is supposed to want.”
“A girl like me?”
“Never mind.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“Forget it.”
And then Henry is gone. He sits on the merry-go-round and shuts everything off, becomes a silent, cold lump. He crosses his arms and stares out into the night. He is punishing her. And it makes her furious, makes her begin trembling. She can feel a nausea beginning in her gut, an agitation in her chest—her heart beating, the little hairs on her neck standing up. She can feel something coming, a familiar wave of sweat and dizziness. She is lightheaded suddenly, and hot and tingly and a little outside herself, as if she is floating above the merry-go-round, looking down, watching the buzzing of her own body. Can Henry see it? The wrecking ball is on its way—the sobbing and choking, the shakes. This has happened before.
“Take me home,” she whispers through clenched teeth.
Who knows if he understands what is happening, but Henry looks at her then and seems to soften. “Listen, Faye—”
“Take me home now.”
“I’m sorry Faye, I shouldn’t have—”
“Now, Henry.”
So he takes her home, and for the whole terrible ride they don’t speak. Faye squeezes the leather seats and tries to fight off the feeling she is dying. When he stops in front of her house, she feels like a ghost, flying away from him without making a sound.
Faye’s mother knows right away. “You’re having an attack,” she says, and Faye nods, wide-eyed, panicky. Her mother takes her to her room and undresses her and puts her in bed and gives her something to drink, dabs a cold washcloth on her forehead and says “It’s okay, it’s all okay” in her quiet and sweet and hushed motherly voice. Faye holds her knees to her chest and sobs and gulps for air while her mother runs her fingers through her hair and whispers “You’re not dying, you’re not going to die” as she has all through Faye’s childhood. And they stay that way until finally the episode passes. Faye calms down. She begins breathing again.
“Don’t tell Dad,” she says.
Her mother nods. “What if this happens in Chicago, Faye? What will you do?”
Her mother squeezes her hand and leaves to fetch another washcloth. And Faye thinks about Henry then. She thinks, almost gladly: Now we have a secret.
3
FAYE DID NOT ALWAYS SUFFER SO. She was once a normally social, normally functioning kid. Then one day something happened to change all that.
It was the day she learned about the house spirit.
It was 1958, a late-summer barbecue, light fading purpley in the west, mosquitoes and lightning bugs, kids playing tag or watching the bug zapper do its frightening business, men and women outside smoking and drinking and leaning against fence posts or each other, and Faye’s father grilling food for a few neighbors, a few guys from work.
This was all his wife’s idea.
Because Frank Andresen had a reputation: He was a little intimidating, a little standoffish. There was the matter of his accent, sure, that he was a foreigner. But more than that was his manner—melancholy, stoic, inward. The neighbors would see Frank outside gardening and ask how he was doing and he wouldn’t say a word, just simply wave with this expression on his face like he had a broken rib he wasn’t telling them about. Eventually they stopped asking.
His wife insisted: We will invite people over, we will let them get to know you, we will have fun.
So here they were, all these neighbor guys in his backyard, having a conversation about some sports team Frank knew nothing about. He could only listen and stand on the conversation’s periphery, because even after eighteen years in the States there were still some words that eluded him, and many of them were sports-related. He listened and tried to have the correct reactions at the appropriate moments and, thus distracted, he let the hot dogs burn.
He motioned to Faye, who was playing tag with two neighbor boys, and when she came to him he said, “Go inside and fetch some hot dogs.” Then he leaned over her and whispered: “From downstairs.”
By which he meant the bomb shelter.
The immaculately cleaned, brilliantly lit, fully stocked bomb shelter that he spent the previous three summers building. He had constructed it at night—only at night, so the neighbors wouldn’t see. He would leave and come back with a truck full of supplies. One night it was two thousand nails. Another it was eleven bags of concrete. He had this kit that showed him how to do it. He would pour the concrete into plastic molds that Faye loved touching because while the concrete was hardening it was also hot. Only once did Faye’s mother ask him about it, early on, asked him why on earth he was building a bomb shelter in their basement. He stared at her with these horrible hollow eyes and gave her this face like Don’t make me say it out loud. Then he went back to the truck.
Faye said yes, she would fetch the hot dogs, and when her father’s back was turned she ran to the two neighbor boys and, because she was eight years old and desperate to be liked, she said, “You want to see something?” To which the answer was of course yes. And so with the two boys Faye entered the house and took them downstairs. Her father had dug up the basement’s stone floor so that the shelter looked like a submarine surfacing right out of the ground. A rectangular concrete box with steel-reinforced walls that could withstand their own house collapsing on top of it. A small door with a padlock—the combination being Faye’s birth date—that Faye opened and took the four steps down into the structure and flipped on the lights. The effect here was like a single aisle from the grocery store had been magically transported into their basement: the brilliant white fluorescents, the cans of food that lined the walls. The boys gasped.
“What is this?” one of them said.
“Our bomb shelter.”
“Wow.”
Shelves crowded with cardboard boxes and wooden crates and mason jars and cans all turned identically label-out: tomatoes, beans, dehydrated milk. Ten-gallon jugs of water, dozens of them, stacked in a pyramid near the door. Radios, bunk beds, oxygen tanks, batteries, boxes of cornflakes stockpiled in the corner, a television with a cord that disappeared into the wall. A hand crank on the wall labeled AIR INTAKE. The boys looked around astonished. They pointed to a locked wooden cabinet with a frosted glass cover and asked what was in there.
“Guns,” Faye said.
“Do you have the key?”
“No.”
“Too bad.”
Upstairs, the boys were delirious. They could not contain their excitement.
“Dad!” they said, running crazily into the backyard. “Dad! Do you know what they have in the basement? A bomb shelter!”
And Frank looked at Faye so hard that she couldn’t bear to meet his eyes.
“A bomb shelter?” said one of the fathers. “No kidding?”
“Not really,” Frank said. “Just supply closet. Like a wine cellar.”
“No it isn’t,” said one of the boys. “It’s huge! And it’s concrete and full of food and guns.”
“Is that so?”
“Can we build one?” said the other boy.
“You get
one of those kits?” said the father. “Or did you do it yourself?”
Frank seemed to consider whether he wanted to engage this question, then softened a bit and stared at the ground.
“Bought the plans,” he said, “then built it myself.”
“How big is it?”
“Thirty by twelve.”
“So that fits, what, how many people?”
“Six.”
“Great! Russians drop the bomb, we’ll know where to go.”
“Funny,” Frank said. His back was turned now. He placed the new hot dogs on the grill, moving them around with long metal tongs.
“I’ll bring the beer,” the father said. “Hear that, kids? We’re all saved.”
“Sorry,” said Frank, “no.”
“We’ll bunk it up for a few weeks. Be like we’re in the service again.”
“No can do.”
“Aw, c’mon. What are you going to do, turn us away?”
“I’m all full.”
“It’ll fit six. You said so yourself. I only count three of you.”
“No telling how long we’ll be down there.”
“Are you serious?”
“I am.”
“You’re pulling my leg. You’d let us in, right? I mean, if there really was a bomb. You’d let us in.”
“Listen to me,” Frank said. He put down the tongs and turned around and put his hands on his hips. “If anyone comes near that door, I will shoot them. You understand? I will shoot them in the head.”
And everyone was quiet. Faye heard nothing but the air hissing out of the sizzling meat.
“Okay, jeez,” the father said. “I was joking, Frank. Settle down.”
And he took his beer and went into the house. And Faye and everyone else followed, leaving Frank out there alone. She watched him that night from a dark upstairs window as he stood over the grill and silently let the meat blacken and burn again.
This would be an enduring memory of her father, an image that captured something important about the man: alone and angry and hunched over with his arms on the table like he was praying to it.
He stayed out there the rest of the evening. Faye was put to bed. Her mom gave her a bath and tucked her in and filled her glass with water. It was always there, that glass, in case she got thirsty in the night. A short, wide tumbler, adult-size with a thick base. She liked to hold it on hot summer evenings, wrap her hands around it and feel its solidity and heaviness. She liked to press it against her cheek and feel its smooth crystalline coldness. And this was what she was doing, holding the glass to her face, when, after a brief and gentle knock, after the door swung slowly and silently open, her father appeared in her bedroom.
“I have something for you,” he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small glass figurine: an old man, white beard, sitting with his legs around a bowl of porridge, wooden spoon in his hand, wrinkly face full of satisfaction.
“It’s very old,” he said.
He handed it to Faye and she studied it, ran her fingers over it. It was hollow and thin and brittle, the colors yellowed, about the size of a small teacup. The figure looked like a smaller, thinner Santa Claus, though with a very different attitude: Whereas Santa always seemed so animated and cheerful, this thing seemed nasty. It was the ugly smirk on his face, maybe, and the way he held the bowl so guardedly, like a dog tensing over food.
“What is it?” Faye asked, and her father said it was a house spirit, a ghost that usually hid in basements, back in old Norway, in a time more enchanted than this one, it seemed to Faye, a time when everything in the world must have been paranormal: spirits of the air, sea, hills, wilderness, house. You had to look for ghosts everywhere back then. Anything in the world might have been another thing incognito. A leaf, a horse, a stone. You could not take them literally, the things of the world. You always had to find the real truth the first truth concealed.
“Did you have one in your basement?” Faye asked. “On the farm?”
Her father brightened as he thought of it. He always brightened at the thought of the old house. He was a serious man who only seemed to cheer up when describing that place: a wide salmon-red three-story wooden house on the edge of town, a view of the ocean out back, a long pier where he fished on quiet afternoons, a field in the front bounded by spruce trees, a pen for the few goats and sheep they owned, and a horse. A house at the top of the world, he said, in Hammerfest, Norway. Talking about it always seemed to restore him.
“Yes,” he said, “even that house was haunted.”
“Do you wish you still lived there?”
“Yes, sometimes,” he said. “It was haunted, but not in a bad way.”
He explained that house spirits weren’t evil. They were sometimes even kind, would take care of the farm, help with the crops, brush the horse’s hair. They kept to themselves and got angry if you didn’t bring them cream porridge on Thursday nights. With loads of butter. They weren’t friendly ghosts, but they weren’t cruel either. They did what they pleased. They were selfish ghosts.
“And this is what they looked like?” Faye said, turning the figurine around in her palm.
“Most of the time they’re invisible,” Frank said. “You can only see them if they want you to see them. So you don’t see them very much.”
“What’s it really called?” she said.
“A nisse,” he said, and she nodded. She loved the weird names her father gave his ghosts: nisse, nix, gangferd, draug. Faye understood that these were old words, European words. Her father used these words sometimes, sometimes accidentally, when he was excited or angry. He once showed her a book full of these words, incomprehensible. It was a Bible, he said, and on the first page was a family tree. There was her name, he pointed out: Faye. And her parents’ names, and names above them too, names she’d never heard before, strange names with strange marks. The paper was thin and fragile and yellow, the black ink faded to lavender and blue. All of these people, she was told, stayed behind, while Fridtjof Andresen changed his name to Frank and came bravely to America.
“Do you think we have a nisse here?” Faye asked.
“You never know,” her father said. “Sometimes they’ll follow you around your whole life.”
“Are they nice?”
“Now and then. They’re temperamental. You mustn’t ever insult them.”
“I wouldn’t insult them,” she said.
“You could do it accidentally.”
“How?”
“When you take your bath, do you splash water on the floor?”
She considered it and admitted yes, she did do that.
“If you spill any water, you must clean it up quickly. So the water doesn’t seep into the basement and drip on your nisse. That would be a big insult.”
“What would happen?”
“He would get angry.”
“Then what would happen?”
“I’ll tell you a story,” he said. And this was the story he told her:
At a farm near Hammerfest, many years ago, there was a beautiful little girl named Freya (and Faye smiled at this, at the proximity of the beautiful girl’s name to her own). One Thursday night, Freya’s father told her to take cream porridge to the nisse. And the little girl was planning to obey her father, but on her way to the basement she grew very hungry. Her mother had made a special batch of porridge that night, with brown sugar and cinnamon and raisins and even thin slices of mutton on top. Freya thought it was a pity to waste all that good food on a ghost. So once she was in the basement and hidden from view, she ate it herself. She licked it from the bowl, then drank the drippings. And scarcely had she finished wiping her chin clean when the nisse rushed out and grabbed her and started to dance. She tried to break free but the grip of the nisse was strong. He crushed her into him and sang “From the nisse did you steal! So dance now until you reel!” and she screamed and screamed, but the nisse pressed her face into his wiry beard so nobody heard. He twirled her around and galloped
from one end of the basement to the other. He was too fast. She couldn’t keep up. She kept falling and tripping, but the nisse pulled her up again and yanked her arms and tore her clothes, and he did this until finally she lay on the ground, in bloody rags, gasping for breath. In the morning, when they found her, she was pale and sick and nearly dead. She was bedridden for months, and even after she was well enough to walk, her father never asked her to take food to the nisse again.
“I’m sorry I took those boys to the basement,” Faye said after he finished the story.
“Go to sleep,” her father said.
“Someday I want to see your home,” Faye said. “The farm in Hammerfest, with the salmon-red house. I’ll go visit.”
“No,” he said, and when he looked at her he looked tired, maybe sad, like when he was standing outside, over those dying coals, alone. “You’ll never see that house.”
That night she couldn’t sleep. She was kept awake for hours by every squeak—every little crack, every rustle of wind and she thought there was an intruder or an apparition. The lights outside shined through tossing leaves and phantomed hideous forms on her wall: burglars, wolves, the devil. She felt hot and fevered and tried to cool herself down with the bedside glass of water, pressing it to her forehead and chest. She sipped the water and thought about her father’s story, about the house spirit: Sometimes they’ll follow you around your whole life. It was a horrifying thought, this beast downstairs, watching them, speaking gibberish.
She looked at the floor as if she could see through it, down to the basement where the ghost was prowling, greedily waiting. She tipped the glass and poured out the water. She felt a bolt of panic as she watched what she was doing, watched the water puddle, a dark brown blot on the light brown carpet. She imagined the water as it seeped into the floor, dripped down through cracks in the wood, over metal slats and across nails and glue and slunk its way beneath her, picking up dust and dirt as it washed into the basement and coldly fell on whatever angry thing was down there, lurking in the darkness.