Ruthie shook her head, lay back in the bed beside Buzz, and closed her eyes. It had been a long, exhausting day. She just needed to rest for a minute.
Suddenly she was back in Fitzgerald’s, holding her mother’s hand. The fluorescent light was flickering above them, growing steadily dimmer.
“What do you choose, Dove?” asked her mother, who held her hand a little too tightly. The bakery seemed to be shrinking around them, the walls closing in.
Ruthie stared at the rows of cakes and cookies and pointed at the pink cupcake. The ceiling was lower now.
Then she looked up to see her mother smiling down. And it was the stranger again—a tall, thin woman with tortoiseshell-framed glasses shaped like cat’s eyes. The bakery wasn’t much bigger than a closet now, and everything had gotten very dark. The only source of light was the glass case that held the cupcakes, which seemed to sparkle and glow.
Ruthie felt that old familiar panic at being in such a small, tight place. She was breathing too fast, doing an openmouthed panting like a dog.
“Good choice, Dove,” the woman said, then reached around the back of her head and pulled on a zipper. Her whole mommy disguise came peeling off, leaving a sack of red oozing flesh with a hole for a mouth.
Ruthie tried to scream, but couldn’t. She gasped herself awake, heart hammering.
She blinked hard. She and Buzz were lying on her mom’s bed, on top of the covers. Buzz was snoring softly. The light was still on, glaring down like an eye. She caught movement off to her right side—something in the closet. She turned; a shadow moved. The cat? No, it was too big to be Roscoe. She sat up, drawing in a sharp breath; from the back corner of the closet she saw the glint of two eyes.
Buzz bolted up in bed, body rigid. “Whatisit?”
Ruthie pointed to the closet, hand shaking. “There’s something in there,” she told him, her throat almost too dry to speak. “Watching us.”
Buzz had his feet on the floor in two seconds and the crowbar in his hand. He bounded to the closet, swept back the clothes on hangers.
“Nothing here,” he said, after a second.
Ruthie shook her head, rolled out of bed, and approached the closet cautiously. There was nothing but the familiar rows of shoes, her parents’ clothing on hangers. But something was different. The air in the closet felt strange—crackling and used up. And there was an odd acrid, burning odor—something familiar to her, but she couldn’t say where she’d smelled it before.
“Maybe it was just a bad dream?” Buzz said, ruffling her hair.
“Yeah, maybe,” she said, and closed the closet door hard, wishing she could lock it.
Visitors from the Other Side
The Secret Diary of Sara Harrison Shea
January 15, 1908
Things have become so very strange—I feel as though I am floating outside my body, watching myself and those around me with the same curiosity as if I were watching actors on a stage. Our kitchen table is piled high with food the women bring: brown bread, baked beans, smoked ham, potpies, potato soup, gingerbread, apple crisp, fruitcake soaked in rum. The smell of the food sickens me. All I can think is how much Gertie would have loved it all—fresh gingerbread topped with whipped cream! But Gertie is gone, and the food keeps coming.
I see myself nod, shake people’s hands, accept their hugs and food and kind gestures. Claudia Bemis has cleaned the house from top to bottom and kept the coffeepot full. The men have split kindling, carried in bundles of firewood, kept the dooryard shoveled.
Lucius has stayed right by Martin’s side. The two of them spent much of yesterday in the barn together, building Gertie’s coffin.
These past two days, so many people have come to pay respects, to say how sorry they are. Their words are hollow. Empty. Soundless bubbles rising to the surface of the water.
Gertie is with the angels now.
We’re praying for you.
The schoolteacher, Delilah Banks, came calling. “Gertie had the most fanciful thoughts,” she said through tears. “I can’t tell you how very much I will miss her.”
One teary-eyed face after another, a chorus of voices low and somber: So sorry. We’re so, so very sorry.
I do not wish for their sympathy—what I want is my Gertie back, and if no one can give me that, then, as far as I’m concerned, the world can just go away and take their tears and potpies and gingerbread with them.
Poor old Shep has taken up residence at the foot of Gertie’s chair in the kitchen. He lies there all day, looking hopeful each time he hears someone enter the room, only to rest his head mournfully on his front paws when he sees it is not Gertie.
“Poor love,” my niece, Amelia, says, getting down on her knees to stroke the dog’s head and feed him choice scraps. Amelia has been very kind. She has insisted on staying with us for a few days to help with things. She is twenty-one, very striking, strong-willed.
Last night, she brought me some warm brandy before bed and insisted I drink the whole cup. “Uncle Lucius says it’ll do you good,” she explained.
Then she took up my brush and began to work the tangles out of my hair. I haven’t had my hair brushed for me since I was a little girl.
“Can I tell you a secret?” Amelia asked.
I nodded.
“The dead never really leave us,” she whispered to me, her lips so near my ear I could feel the warmth of her breath. “There is a circle of ladies in Montpelier who meet once a month and speak with those who have passed on. I have been several times now, and heard the spirits rapping on the table. You must come with me, Aunt Sara,” she said, her voice growing urgent. “As soon as you feel up to it, we will go.”
“Martin would not approve,” I said.
“Then we won’t tell him,” she whispered.
Martin has been no comfort—he is shy, clumsy, and awkward. Once, I found these things sweetly boyish and endearing; now I find myself wishing that he were a different man, a man more sure of himself. I have come to despise the way he never looks anyone in the eye—how is a man like that to be trusted? There was a time, not all that long ago, I even loved his limp, because in some way it reminded me of everything he’d given our family—his constant drive to keep us warm and fed, to keep the farm going no matter what. Now I loathe the way his bad foot scrapes across the floor so noisily; it is the sound of weakness and failure. I know it’s wrong, and it makes me sick, this new seething venom inside me, but I cannot help it.
Deep down, I understand the true cause of these feelings: I blame Martin for what happened to Gertie. If she hadn’t followed him into the woods that morning, she would still be here by my side.
“We will see our way through this,” he tells me, squeezing my hand in his own, which is as cool and damp as a fish. He gives me a warm, loving smile, but behind it I see his concern.
I do not answer. I do not tell him that I no longer wish to get through it. That what I want most is to sneak away and throw myself down into the bottom of that well so I can be with my Gertie once more.
Even Reverend Ayers can offer no relief.
He came this afternoon to discuss the service and burial arrangements for Gertie. I had been putting off this discussion, but today Martin and Lucius announced that it was time, we had waited long enough.
We sat at the table over cups of coffee that grew cold before us. Reverend Ayers had brought a basket of muffins his wife, Mary, had made. There was some talk of burying Gertie up at the cemetery by Cranberry Meadow with Martin’s family, but I wouldn’t have it.
“She belongs here,” I said. Martin nodded, and Lucius opened his mouth to say something but thought better of it. And so it was decided we would bury her in the small family plot behind the house, beside her tiny brother, my mother and father and brother.
As Reverend Ayers was leaving, he took my hand. “You must remember, Sara, that Gertie is in a better place now. She’s with our Lord.”
I spat in his face.
I did this without thinking, a
utomatically, as if it were as natural to me as taking a sip of water when thirsty.
Imagine, me spitting in Reverend Ayers’s face! I’ve known the man all my life—he baptized me, married Martin and me, buried our son, Charles. I have struggled all my life to believe his teachings, to live the word of God. But no more.
“Sara!” Lucius said, looking alarmed as he pulled a clean white handkerchief out of the front pocket of his trousers and handed it to the reverend.
Reverend Ayers wiped at his face and stepped back away from me. He looked … not angry or worried about me, but frightened of what I might do next.
“If the God you worship and pray to is the one who brought my Gertie to that well, who took her from me, then I want nothing more to do with him,” I said. “Please leave my house and take your vicious God with you.”
Poor Martin was horrified and stuttered off excuses for me.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, as he and Lucius walked Reverend Ayers out. “She’s sick with grief. Not in her right mind.”
Not in my right mind.
But I am in the same mind I have had all along. Only now there is a piece missing. A Gertie-shaped piece cut from the center of my very being.
And perhaps, with this new grief, I am seeing things clearly for the first time.
I understand now that Martin has never known the real me. There is only one person who ever did—who saw all of me, all the beauty along with the ugliness. And it is that person I long for now.
Auntie.
For so long, I have done my best to push all my memories of her away. I’ve spent my whole adult life trying to convince myself that she got what she deserved; that her death, terrible as it was, was the consequence of her own actions. But that’s never been what I truly believed. What I think about most is how I should have done something to stop it. If I had found a way to save her, I tell myself, maybe my life might have turned out differently. Perhaps all the tragedy and loss I have suffered is somehow linked to what I did that one day when I was nine.
It’s funny that she is the person I long for most in times like these, when my heart has been shattered and I see no sense in going on.
She is the only one who might know what to say to me now, who might be able to offer true comfort. And I know, I just know, she would laugh when I told her I spat in the reverend’s face!
She’d throw back her head and laugh.
Reverend Ayers says there is only one God,” I told Auntie once. It was only a few weeks after I’d seen Hester Jameson out in the woods and asked Auntie about sleepers. “And that it is wrong to pray to anyone or anything else.”
Auntie laughed, then spat brown tobacco juice onto the ground. We were bumping along in her old wagon, all loaded with animal pelts, for a trip to a dealer in St. Johnsbury. She made the trip four times a year, and he always gave her a fair price for the skins. This was the first time Father had consented to let me make the overnight trip with her. Before leaving, Auntie had sprinkled some tobacco on the ground around the wagon and said a safe-journey prayer to the spirits and the four directions.
“Young Reverend Ayers looks at a lake and sees only his own reflection in it; that is what God is to him. He does not see the creatures that live down deep, the dragonflies that hover, the frog on the lily pad.” Auntie’s face was full of pity and scorn as she shook her head and spat tobacco juice again. “His heart and mind are closed to the true beauty of the lake, the place where all its magic lies.”
Auntie held the reins, guided the horse to pull us along the narrow dirt road that was full of ruts from wagon wheels. Sometimes I doubted Auntie needed the reins at all; it seemed she could get the horse to do just what she wanted by talking to it. She had the amazing ability to communicate with almost any animal; she could call birds to her, bring fish closer to her net. Once, I saw her coax a lynx out of hiding and right into her snare.
We bumped along slowly. The air was warm and sweet and full of birdsong. We were several miles east of town now, surrounded by rolling green hills dotted with cream-colored sheep that bleated contentedly as they ate their fill of fresh spring greens.
“But he’s a clever man,” I said. “He has studied for years. He reads the Bible every day.”
“There are different kinds of cleverness, Sara.”
I nodded, understanding just what she meant. Auntie was the cleverest person I knew; people came to her little cabin in the woods from all over town to buy remedies and cures, spells for love and good crops. But no one talked about it or admitted that they’d paid Auntie for a syrup to cure a child’s cough, or a charm to wear to attract their heart’s desire.
“Reverend Ayers says when we die our souls go on to Heaven, to be with God.”
“Is that what you believe?” Auntie asked, her eyes fixed on the rough road ahead.
“It’s not what you have taught me,” I answered.
“And what is it I have taught you?” She turned toward me, raised her eyebrows.
Auntie was often giving me these little tests, and I knew I had to choose my words carefully—if I answered wrong, she might ignore me for hours, pretend I wasn’t there; she might even go so far as not to give me my share of lunch or dinner. I had learned at a young age that disappointing Auntie always meant paying a price, and it was something I worked very hard to avoid.
“You always say that death is not an ending, but a beginning. That the dead cross over to the world of the spirits and are surrounding us still.”
Auntie nodded, waiting for more.
“I like that idea,” I told her. “That they’re all around us, watching.”
Auntie smiled at me.
On our left was a narrow stream, and as it was a clear day, we could see Camel’s Hump off in the distance. On our right was a neat row of apple trees in bloom, the scent heady and sweet. Bees buzzed from flower to flower, flying drunkenly, weighted down with pollen.
I moved closer to Auntie there in the cart; her hands on the reins were the strongest hands I’d ever known. I felt safe and thrilled, and as if I was right where I belonged.
Later that night, after we’d sold the furs to the merchant in St. Johnsbury, we camped by the river in a grassy clearing under a willow tree. Auntie had made us a little bed in the back of the wagon, out of a bearskin and blankets. She had a fire blazing, and when it died down, we cooked the trout she’d just caught on sticks, turning them gently over the glowing coals. She’d brought out an enameled pot and used it to brew a sweet tea full of herbs and roots, which we drank from tin mugs. After dinner, after the fire had been rekindled, Auntie sucked on the fish bones until she had removed every morsel of meat. She ate nearly every part of the fish, even the eyeballs. The innards she threw to Buckshot, who’d wandered off from camp and come back with his own dinner, a woodchuck that had been too slow to get back into its den.
The moon was not up, and the night was inky black. We couldn’t see anything beyond the circle of light that the fire cast. The world beyond had turned to nothing but noises: the babble of the river, which had seemed soothing in daylight and now carried strange eerie-sounding murmurs; the occasional croak of a bullfrog; the far-off hoot of an owl.
“Tell my future,” I begged as I plucked at the long, soft grass that grew around me.
Auntie smiled, stretched like a cat. “Not tonight. The moon is not right for such things.”
“Please,” I pleaded, tugging at her coat as I had when I was a much younger child. I loved that coat. The colorful painted flowers along the bottom, the beads and porcupine quills stitched in neat patterns over the shoulders and down the front.
“Very well,” she said, throwing the fish bones into the fire and wiping her greasy hands on her skirt. She reached into the pouch she carried tucked into her belt and withdrew a small amount of finely ground powder.
“What is that?”
“Shh,” Auntie said. Then she mumbled something I did not hear—another prayer, I supposed. A wish. An incantation.
&n
bsp; She tossed the powder into the fire. It crackled and hissed, made the fire sparkle with shades of blue and green. The drooping branches of the willow above us seemed to catch the light and glow, and they swayed like tiny arms, reaching for us. Out on the water, there was the splash of a bird landing, a duck or heron.
Auntie stared into the flames, searching.
Then—did I imagine it?—Auntie seemed to flinch and look away. There was a sharp intake of breath, as if the fire had dealt her a blow.
“What is it?” I asked, leaning toward her. “What did you see?”
“Nothing,” Auntie said, looking away from me, but I knew her well enough to tell that she was lying. Auntie had seen something terrible in my future, something dark enough to make her turn away.
“Tell me,” I said, putting my hand on her arm. “Please.”
She shook my hand off as if I were a pesky insect. “There is nothing to tell,” Auntie snapped.
“Please,” I repeated, grabbing her arm again, my hand touching the soft deerskin coat. “I know you saw something.”
Her eyes turned dark, and she reached down and gave the back of my hand a hard pinch. I jerked my hand away and drew back.
“As I said, the moon is not right for such things. Maybe next time you will listen.”
Auntie gazed back into the fire, which was dying back down, all the bright colors gone. I moved even farther away, wrapped my arms around my knees, and slid closer to the heat. My hand stung where she had pinched it, and I wondered if she had broken the skin, but knew better than to look. Best to ignore the pain, to pretend it hadn’t happened.
After a few moments of uneasy silence, she looked my way.
“What I can tell you is this: you are special, Sara Harrison, but you already know this. You have something inside you that makes you different from others.” She looked at me with such seriousness that my chest felt heavy. “Something that shines bright, gives you the same gifts I have. The gifts of sight, of magic. It makes you stronger than you know. And, oh, little Sara, let me tell you this.” She smiled, rocking forward, throwing another stick onto the fire. It crackled and popped as it caught. “If you ever grow up and have a girl child, the gift will be passed down double to her. That girl will walk between the worlds. She will be as powerful as I am, maybe more. I have seen it in the fire.”
The Winter People Page 10