Charlotte’s Story

by Benedict, Laura

  Only Hugh stood silently in the background, looking out the night-blackened windows. I still wondered why he’d really decided to come. It had to be J.C., though there didn’t seem to be anything more than a casual friendship between them. Of course, no one else was supposed to know that something more had happened. I was surrounded by so much deceit.

  “I guess if there was ever any doubt that Bliss House is haunted, it’s gone now.” Rachel laughed nervously, and I saw Jack shoot her a look.

  I held out my hand to her. “Maybe you need something, Rachel. All this excitement can’t be good for the baby.”

  Rachel looked at me questioningly. Had she narrowed her eyes just the slightest bit? I wanted them all out of the house, including J.C. Odious J.C. I wanted her away from me most of all. What I suspected her of now was worse than being my husband’s lover. She was a conspirator. Was Rachel the only one I could trust now?

  “It’s not a laughing matter,” J.C. said sternly, looking at Rachel.

  “Fuck you.” Rachel turned her back on J.C. and missed the latter’s look of serene disdain. The rest of us were used to Rachel’s occasional profanity.

  “Jack, I want to go home. I’m exhausted and this isn’t fun anymore.”

  I was glad that she and Jack were leaving. Perhaps Hugh would take the hint. Jack looked at Press, eyebrows raised. Press gave a slight nod. I relaxed a little.

  “Yes, I think we’d all better call it a night,” Press said. He walked over to the bar table. “Quick one for the road, Jack?”

  Rachel came to sit beside me. She started talking, but I missed most of what she said because I was watching Jack and Press at the bar.

  When Press handed him his Scotch, Jack’s hand slid gently over Press’s and lingered there a moment before he took the glass. As Jack sipped, he watched Press closely as he talked, a look of comfortable pleasure on his handsome face.

  “Charlotte? Are you listening? Do you want to come home with us, honey? You can go up and get Michael if it’s all just too much to stay here. I know you must be devastated. Eva was so close. It was as though she could just come downstairs and climb up onto your lap, wasn’t it? I don’t know when I’ve seen anything so strange.” She tilted her head, like a small bird. “Do you think she’d say anything else? I wonder if she knows what happened to her.”

  Now that I was paying attention, I saw that Rachel did look disturbed, even afraid, as though she truly believed we had all seen the real Eva.

  I wonder if she knows what happened to her.

  I felt my face go hot. Had Eva known she was dying? Dear God, was Rachel being cruel, or just her thoughtless self? I shook my head, not really caring what question she thought I was answering.

  “If you change your mind, the car knows the way to the house.” She called across the room to Hugh. “Hugh? It looks like Jack isn’t finished drinking for the night, and it’s not even nine o’clock. Do you want to come by?” Before he could answer, Rachel rose awkwardly from the sofa, one delicate hand on my knee for support.

  Her emerald green dress hung artfully from its Empire waist, but she was far too pregnant for it to disguise her baby bump. She wore gold-heeled sandals that complemented the gold satin collar of the dress. I had tried to stay fashionable during both of my pregnancies, but I never came close to Rachel’s precise style. She turned to call for Jack.

  “Rachel.” I kept my voice low.

  “What is it? Is something wrong?”

  “The back of your dress. Don’t you feel it?”

  Rachel twisted her head over her shoulder and pulled at the side of her dress to look. She laughed. “Oh, shit. Press! Jack! My water broke.”

  Now Rachel would have her own child. I knew then that I was completely alone.

  Nonie was gone. Eva was gone. Press had put Shelley between Michael and me. I felt Eva’s absence even more keenly, but I understood that the pathetic, dripping wraith that had come to visit me in Olivia’s morning room was the real Eva. Not the child in the gallery who, I was certain, was flesh and blood. I had no friends around me. How odd that Olivia, whom I hadn’t liked very much in life, was now the only one that I felt I could trust. And she was dead.

  It had been some kind of miracle that the earlier screams hadn’t woken Michael. As Press and Jack had led me back downstairs, I’d seen Shelley come to stand at the railing outside the nursery, but she had quickly gone back inside.

  Before I went to bed, I needed to see Michael.

  Shelley, sleeping on a cot in a corner of the room, didn’t stir as I knelt by the trundle where Michael lay sleeping. In the light from the hall, I could see the flush of heat on his round cheeks. He’d pushed off his covers and lay in his sleep shirt and diaper. Though his diaper was wet, I didn’t wake him to change him, but only pulled the covers up to his chest so he wouldn’t wake, cold, during the night. Kneeling on the carpet beside him, I stroked his forehead.

  “It’s all going to be all right,” I whispered. I felt it, even as I was saying it. I just wasn’t exactly sure what was wrong, or how I was supposed to fix it.

  While I knelt there, a shadow interrupted the narrow shaft of light coming from the hall, and I knew it was Press, waiting for me. I wasn’t in any hurry.

  Shelley stirred as I went out, but she didn’t wake. She was so young. Only nineteen, she was almost a child herself. Although I knew she was the same sweet girl who, as a fifteen-year-old, had come to pet and admire Eva when she was a baby, I found myself not trusting her. Maybe if I had been the one to suggest that she come, I might have felt differently. All I knew at that moment was that she was sleeping in my son’s bedroom and I was not.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to drive you to the hospital? Don’t you think Rachel needs her hand held?”

  Across the gallery, the door to J.C.’s room was closed.

  “Shhhhhhh.” Moving quickly past Press, I left the nursery doorway. He followed. Reaching his bedroom door, I stopped but didn’t go inside.

  “You think I would leave Michael now?”

  “You’re upset.”

  “Rachel doesn’t need me there. I called her mother. I’m sure she arrived even before Rachel and Jack.”

  He touched my hair, and I recoiled. The cold surprise in his eyes only lasted a moment, and the look of tender solicitude returned. I knew he was acting.

  “We should go to bed. I wish you had let Jack give you something.”

  “We should talk about Eva.”

  He took my arm to try to lead me into his bedroom, but where once I would’ve followed, I jerked away.

  “Don’t lose your head over this, Charlotte. I don’t want a scene.”

  It was my turn to be surprised.

  “A scene? After what happened tonight, you’re worried about me making a scene in my own house? Don’t you think you should be more worried about what your good friend J.C. tried to do to us?”

  Now he did pull me inside and shut the door. I knew that in a test of strength, I would lose.

  “Or were you in charge of that little show? Maybe J.C. was just the hired help. Bravo to you both.”

  Press shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “She arranged for some little girl to come and pretend she was Eva. I heard her running away. For God’s sake, Press. It didn’t even look like Eva.”

  Press scoffed. “That’s crazy. You know this house. You know what’s possible. Why wouldn’t Eva come back? She misses us.”

  “I don’t know what to think anymore, Press. For years you’ve told me that nothing strange is happening here, and then you change your mind. I don’t know what you believe or what you care about, except for your little group of theater friends. I don’t even know if you loved Eva. I know for damned sure that you don’t really love me.”

  I’d begun to shake and felt horribly cold with anger and worry. The shivering reached into my bones and I had to clench my jaw shut to keep my teeth from chattering.

  I hated
what was happening to me.

  “Calm down.”

  “You calm down!” But I spoke from between clenched teeth.

  It hurts, Mommy.

  It didn’t matter that the child had been a fraud. They were surely Eva’s own words.

  The water hurts.

  “You’re embarrassing yourself. You’re not well. Everyone sees it. You haven’t been yourself since you let Eva die.”

  For the first time in our marriage, I struck my husband. My arm and fist were stiff as I swung at him, and I wasn’t strong, but when I made contact with the side of his face it put him off-balance and he stumbled sideways, surprised. His misstep was undignified and clumsy—mostly because I’d taken him off guard. Instead of striking me back as a less patient, less genteel man might have, he regarded me with a look of undisguised contempt.

  Unwilling to continue with him, I ran through the door that joined our bedrooms and slammed it shut. I’d long ago lost the key, but I didn’t hear him following me. I was fairly certain he wouldn’t follow.

  I collapsed on the floor against the door. Finally he had said it out loud—the thing that everyone around us, everyone around me was always thinking. I was responsible. Eva had died on my watch. I’d been passed out, drunk. No one blamed Press. Only me. He had simply moved on, grieving little, not changing his habits or appetites. I hadn’t even been able to refuse his physical advances as I lay on the bed where my daughter had slept in the hour before she died. Where was my outrage over his complicity? My dignity? I had none. J.C. had taunted me. I was a joke in my own house.

  Yet. . . .

  Bliss House didn’t hate me. Olivia was there, and the real Eva. Perhaps they were my real strength. Olivia had let me see her weakness and shame. And what I had seen in the hall, just that night. Olivia had trusted me with the truth. The world believed that Michael Searle Bliss had died from a ruptured appendix, but he had hanged himself. The world believed that Randolph Bliss was dead when Michael Searle was married, but he had been very much alive. I trusted the house to show me the truth. I wondered if Press knew the truth. Terrance had known. Had that been why Olivia kept him on after he’d witnessed her abuse and humiliation? Quiet Terrance. Blackmail was definitely a quiet man’s game.

  I couldn’t—wouldn’t—stay in my own room. It didn’t feel safe. It didn’t feel right. Bliss House was my home, and I wouldn’t leave it, but neither could I bear to be near Press.

  Still shaking a bit, I slipped off my shoes and went to the door. Downstairs, Terrance and Marlene were putting away the table and chairs we’d used for the séance. While they often worked together in silence, now I could hear the murmur of Marlene’s voice, but I couldn’t make out her words. She’d been helpful getting Rachel out the door, bringing towels, damp and dry, and a pillow so she could lie down in the back of the car. I wondered whose side Marlene was on. The answer Press’s, of course came to me quickly, unbidden.

  I couldn’t sleep in the nursery because of Shelley. Across the hall, Olivia’s door was still open. If only she were still there, still alive, so little of what had happened in the past few weeks would have happened. Eva would certainly still be alive as well.

  There would have been no champagne, and no falling asleep. Press might have left the house, but the children wouldn’t have been left alone with me.

  I had to stop.

  I quickly changed into a nightgown and robe and took my pillow from the bed. Remembering the icy chill of the morning room, I also took my bed’s thick white coverlet.

  With the door always shut, the morning room was colder than any other inhabited room in Bliss House, but it felt welcoming all the same. In the wan light from the windows I arranged my pillow and coverlet on the chaise and lay down, wakeful. Across the room, the sheet still hung across the wall and the Magic Lantern still sat on the table. Would I see Olivia again? Or perhaps Michael Searle? I kept my eyes open so I wouldn’t see—again and again—that body hanging from the gallery. How terrifying it must have been to find it there. I wondered who the witnesses were. So many unanswered questions. Overwhelmed, I half-hoped Olivia would not show me anything else that night.

  This was the rest of my life: a dead child, a living child, a husband I didn’t know if I could trust. Ghosts. So many ghosts. I couldn’t feel them at that moment, but I knew they were waiting. One day I might be one of those ghosts, trapped in death, as I was trapped in life.

  After a few minutes beneath the warm blanket, my eyes closed, and I was watching Eva inside the playhouse as she mixed grass and leaves and tiny pebbles together in a bowl. “I’m making supper,” she told me. “But you can’t come in because you’re too big. Only me. Only Michael.”

  At the mention of Michael’s name, I looked around for my son, but he wasn’t inside the playhouse or out. In the distance I heard angry voices and I looked toward the woods, which were glassy with frost. Men’s or women’s voices, I couldn’t tell. Just a constant growl of argument. When I looked back into the playhouse, it had changed. Grown larger. Eva was grown larger, too, into a blowsy caricature of a little girl. But she was still Eva. The bowl had filled with water and her hand, swishing around the grass and debris, was bloated and white. I looked away.

  In the far corner of the room—it seemed miles away—I saw Michael Searle, his face drawn and sad, perched on a chair like a bird. His voluminous white nightshirt billowed around him like a cloud.

  I walked away, knowing Eva was safe.

  Chapter 29

  Contrition

  I watched Shelley and Michael from the nursery window. It was a sunny, crisp day and even from a distance I could see how red Michael’s cheeks were. As a baby, Eva had been slender—not too thin, but not a chubby baby either. Michael was all boy, with rounded elbows and cheeks and knees. In his chunky knitted sweater and corduroy pants, he looked like a ripe plum.

  As Shelley stood by, Michael climbed in and out of the wagon. Every second or third time he got out, he would go to the back and try to push it forward before climbing back in again. He’d been such a compliant baby, but now he was becoming more certain of himself. More demanding. Still, he was good-natured and always loving. When he finally tired of the game, Shelley bent to pick him up, her shoulder-length brown hair falling forward, hiding her face, but I could tell she was confident and cheerful with him. With a pang of guilt, I realized that she was probably a better companion for an active toddler than Nonie.

  I’d found a brief letter from Nonie on my breakfast tray, saying that my father was anxious to be back on his feet. The doctor wanted to keep him in bed as long as possible, but he’d been practicing all they would let him with his crutches. She said she’d found the house in good shape, and that the part-time housekeeper was doing a decent job, even if the kitchen curtains needed to be washed. I imagined Nonie in the kitchen, fussing with every detail. When I got to the line where she asked how I was doing, I knew she was really asking how I was doing without Eva, and I almost broke down. That wasn’t a question I could answer easily. We had talked for just a few minutes only days before, but we had kept the conversation light. How I wished she were still at Bliss House, outside with Michael, instead of in a far corner of the state. She would’ve stopped any talk of a séance just by her presence. So much was different, and she’d only been gone a few days. I wondered how long it would be before I saw her again.

  Satisfied that Michael was all right, I started back to my room to dress. Despite my sadness, I felt more rested than I’d felt in weeks. I’d awakened in daylight to the friendly laughter of the workmen on the outer stairs leading up to the theater. There had been no visitations in the night, no visions of Olivia or Michael Searle or Eva. Sleeping in the morning room had been the right choice.

  Before I’d even passed the nursery, I heard the door to the yellow room open.

  “Charlotte.”

  J.C. wore her dressing gown and her hair was brushed severely back from her face, which sagged with exhaustion.

  �
�Please, Charlotte.”

  The way she glanced up and down the gallery after she called for me was almost comical. What lie was she going to tell me that she didn’t want anyone else to hear?

  Looking back, I wish I hadn’t spoken to her so coldly. “Didn’t you say the decorators would be finishing up tomorrow? Don’t waste your time talking to me.” Shaking a bit inside, I continued toward my room. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her speed along the gallery, no doubt coming to confront me. But I wouldn’t listen to her lies. I almost had the bedroom door shut when she pushed against it with surprising strength, forcing me backwards.

  For a moment she looked stunned to have gained access to the room and to me, then hurried to shut the door behind herself. She looked around, perhaps performing some split-second professional appraisal of the room’s details, or maybe just looking for Press. Satisfied, she grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me toward a chair.

  We’d gone only a few feet when I jerked free and stopped.

  “Enough.”

  We faced each other.

  “Jonathan was afraid. Do you know what it means when someone on the other side is afraid?”

  “Why are you even here? You didn’t need to be here for the stupid renovation. I know you’re here for Press, whatever that means to the two of you. Have you had your little laugh over fooling the precious bride?”

  J.C.’s panicked face tightened further, and I knew I had struck some truth. Before I could continue, she interrupted.

  “Jonathan has never abandoned me when I’ve asked him to come. There were too many others here. Too much was disturbed. What do you know, Charlotte? What did you see? I know you saw something.”

  “I saw what you—or was it you and Press?—wanted me to see. Everyone saw the girl.”