And Give You Peace

by Jessica Treadway

  I felt completely caught between the two choices. I wanted both and neither; it seemed that our old house was calling me closer, yet at the same time it warned me to stay away.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “How about this, as a compromise,” Rosemary suggested. “Justine and I, and Ana if she wants to, will walk down into town and grab something to eat at that ice-cream restaurant you always liked—what’s it called?”

  “The Toll Gate,” Justine and I answered in unison, and we smiled.

  “Right. Margaret, you can go to Kay’s, and we’ll meet you back here at, let’s say, four. Sound good?”

  “Oh, Rose, thank you.” My mother looked grateful, and I tried to read in her face what she hoped I would do.

  “Coming, Ana?” my aunt asked, as she and Justine turned in the direction of Birch Street and the Four Corners. I imagined myself sitting in a booth, folding down the corners of my paper place mat while we waited for burgers, and wondered what it would feel like to go back home.

  “I’ll go with them,” I said, gesturing toward my mother and Kay. Briefly, my sister looked as if I had betrayed her. But then she smiled again. “Careful,” she whispered, as if it were a code.

  Justine and Rosemary took off in the direction of town, and I followed my mother and Kay down the path to the edge of the cemetery where the road began. Although it was daylight, only a bit after two o’clock, I felt as if we were moving with stealth through the darkness toward a forbidden place. When we emerged at the mouth of Pearl Street, Kay was already starting down the street, but my mother and I stood still for a moment to take in breath. The house we had lived in was farther down around the bend, and I knew that we were both trying to get ready.

  When Kay realized we were hanging back, she waited. “There’s a new family in your house,” she said. She rubbed a stone back and forth with the toe of her sneakers, and I could tell that she was trying to sound casual, as if none of this were a big deal. “Two boys, two girls. One of those families where all the names start with the same letter—Kevin, Kelly, Kyle, and Kate.” She laughed, brushing stray hair from her face. “Or something like that.”

  Her voice—its familiar kindness, its gentle warmth—invited us onward, and we walked like timid children toward its touch. I kept imagining curtains being pulled aside so that we could be watched and whispered about, and I sensed the same apprehension in my mother as she gave sidelong glances at the houses we knew from carpools and trick-or-treating and open houses on Christmas Eve. She put a hand on my shoulder, and I looked at her with a question in my face until I saw that she only wanted to feel me by her, to make sure I was really there. I could tell that we both felt the same pull coming from our old home—it was like magnetism, or gravity, and we had to fight its force to stay on the other side of the street where the Lonergans lived.

  The noises we’d heard from the cemetery, I saw now, came from a game of jump rope in our old driveway. There were five girls playing, two who were clearly sisters—they wore their red hair pulled back by matching headbands and identical sweatshirts from Disney World—and three others, all of whom appeared to be between the ages of six and nine.

  “Listen, Ana,” my mother said, “that’s one of the jump-rope songs you guys used to sing. Isn’t it?”

  And, indeed, it was—as they turned the rope and alternated jumping into the center, the girls chanted,

  Mother, mother, I feel sick.

  Send for the doctor, quick, quick quick.

  Doctor, doctor, will I die?

  Yes, my dear, and so will I.

  How many days do I have left?

  One, two, three, four…

  The jumping girl missed on the count of twelve, and one of the other girls squealed and told her, “Don’t die before Christmas, retard!” setting off another round of boisterous giggles.

  “I never noticed what a sick song that is for kids to be singing,” I said, thinking only for the first time about what the lyrics meant.

  Russell Stinson was sitting in his wheelchair on his front porch, and when he saw us, he raised his beer can in a salute. “Over and out!” he shouted, across the street. “Rise and shine!”

  “Hey, Russell,” I managed to call back weakly. The little girls had stopped to listen to our exchange, but I hurried to follow Kay to the back of her house, where her husband was shaking charcoal into the grill.

  “Two more for lunch, Ed,” she said, and I could tell she was trying to keep her tone light.

  “How are you, Margaret?” Then Ed must have realized he was supposed to do something more than just say hello, so he leaned over and kissed her awkwardly at the side of her head. When he let her go, he picked up a can of Budweiser and popped it open. It was the same brand of beer that Russell was drinking, across the street; I wondered if Ed Lonergan kept Russell supplied, and if this is what he meant when, in his campaign brochures for town office, he listed volunteer work with veterans.

  “Oh, fine, Ed,” my mother answered. “I hope it’s not an imposition, our staying—I hope you have enough.” She’d spotted the four hamburger patties sitting on the plate by the side of the grill.

  “Sure,” he said, but the tone of his voice would more closely have matched if his words had been, “Goddammit, Kay. Did you have to? What are we going to do with these people?”

  “I’ll just run down to Falvo’s and get some more meat,” he told us, too cheerfully. “Hamburgs okay, Margaret?” He also looked at me when he asked, but I knew he didn’t want to venture guessing my name, because he always got my sisters’ and mine mixed up.

  “Great,” my mother said, and I nodded, too. “But don’t go to any trouble, Ed, really. I know this is unexpected.”

  “No sweat. Be back in a minute.” He gave the smile again, which chilled me a little in its emptiness, and brushed by us toward his car. My mother and I looked at each other, and I knew we were both thinking the same thing: he had raw hamburger meat still on his hands, and he had only wiped them on a paper towel, no soap and hot water, before he left. As much as I try not to, I always notice these things, now more than I ever did before my father died: how careful (or not) people are to avoid germs, to make themselves clean when they’ve been exposed to contamination. I knew I would not be able to eat the hamburger Ed served me when he came back and handled the meat with those same hands. My mother would force the bites down, but she would be thinking about my father the whole time. I wished I’d gone with my sister and my aunt, and as soon as I realized this I knew I couldn’t sit down on the patio with my mother and Kay and make small talk.

  “I’ll be back,” I said, “okay? I think I’ll take a walk.”

  “Be careful,” my mother said, and then she smiled, catching herself in how silly the warning sounded. “It’s just reflex,” she added.

  I went around to the front of the Lonergans’ house and paused by the hydrangea bush in the front yard. It was the same one I had hidden behind on the night of Kay’s fortieth birthday party, the summer I was nine.

  On that night, my parents had left me in charge of my sisters, telling me that if I needed anything, I should just come across the street to the party and get one of them. It was a hot night in August, and I could hear music and laughter through the screens. When Justine and Meggy fell asleep, I went outside in my nightie and flip-flops and walked up the Lonergans’ driveway toward the backyard, where I stopped and hid behind the hydrangea bush.

  From where I stood, I could see most of the party and hear much of what was being said. The host, Mr. Lonergan, was telling a joke to a group of people in a circle around him at the grill. I didn’t hear the joke itself, but it made some of the women blush and put hands over their mouths to cover the smiles. My mother was one of them. So was Mrs. Lonergan. I watched her whisper something to my mother and they both giggled, and then Mrs. Lonergan put her pretty, dark head briefly against my mother’s shoulder, and it was then that I saw they shared secrets, and I wanted so badly to be let in on th
em that I wasn’t sure whether the sound I uttered was from this yearning or from the sudden sting of the mosquito on the back of my thigh.

  I slapped at the mosquito and was about to turn around for home, when I heard a familiar sound that made my breath grow quick. It was my mother’s voice saying, “Stop, Tom. Tom, calm down.” She was trying to speak softly, but I realized that if I could hear it from the edge of the yard, then so could anybody at the party. I was afraid to look, but I had to, and what I saw was my father standing by the side of the grill, where raw hamburger patties were stacked high on a platter. He was looking down at the meat as if he were hypnotized. His frozen posture and expression had caught the attention of other guests, and my mother went over to put her hand on his arm, but he shook her touch off gently.

  From the plate of hamburger, a fly rose and flittered away into the dark. By looking at my father’s face, I could tell that the fly had been sitting on the meat. This kind of thing normally undid my father to such an extent that he avoided anything that had to do with eating outdoors, but because it was Kay Lonergan’s birthday and close to home, he’d made an exception. Now, I could see, he regretted it. My mother was telling him, “Steady, Tom. You don’t have to eat it. Why don’t you get me a beer?” but even her quietest, most comforting tone could not soothe him. So she leaned closer, and I imagined that I knew what she was whispering: “Go on home, then.” The party guests who had noticed my father’s behavior were raising eyebrows at each other, and a few of them smiled in a way that made me feel angry and, more than that, ashamed.

  My father nodded, and he turned toward the hydrangea bush where I was standing. I saw him try to give a little wave to Mrs. Lonergan, but she was already talking to somebody else. My mother watched my father walk away from her to the edge of the patio. I knew I should have run across the street and pretended not to have left the house, but instead of moving I waited for my father to reach me. “Hi, Daddy,” I said.

  He didn’t seem surprised to find me there. “Hi, sweetheart,” he answered. His face showed neither disapproval nor pleasure, and the words sounded automatic, like a bad actor saying a line. He put his arm around me and we walked across the street together, and I remember feeling—although he didn’t put his weight against me—that I was guiding an invalid home.

  Now, across the street, the girls at my old house were intent on their chalk drawings, and the rope lay twisted across itself and forgotten at their feet. I felt myself wanting to hesitate at the foot of the driveway, but I swallowed the instinct and kept going. Russell’s mother had wheeled him inside, probably to go to the bathroom. But I knew he’d be back; the cooler filled with cans of Budweiser sat waiting for his return.

  Approaching the stone walkway my father had laid the summer before he died, I suddenly remembered a dream I’d been having the past couple of months, since Justine and I came back to the house in August to clean it out. In the dream, I wandered without haste or fear through these rooms. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there, because new people lived in it now, but I was unable to make myself leave. Everything was set up the way I knew it, and as I walked through the house, I marveled at the fact that the new family had furnished its home exactly as we had, even down to the photographs held in place with strawberry magnets on the refrigerator. Even the photos were of our family, not theirs.

  But when I reached out to touch the faces, the photographs slipped off the fridge before my fingers made contact, and when I bent to retrieve them from the floor, they slid away as if carried by a breeze. I chased them around the kitchen, but finally they disappeared under the door of the pantry, and I knew I couldn’t open that door.

  The pantry was where my father collected things—yard-sale flyers, the labels from food cans, old soap slivers, inkless pens, gum wrappers, used-up deodorants. The dead leaves of houseplants. Broken thumbtacks. Pencils worn down to the nubs. I’m sure there was more, but after a while I stopped wanting to know, and I stayed away from the pantry because I could tell that it was a source of tension between my parents. “There’s something wrong with this, Tom,” I remember my mother saying one Saturday morning when Meggy, trying to hide from Justine and me, opened the pantry door to send a collection of empty vitamin bottles and burned-out lightbulbs rattling onto the floor. “Do you know that? Do you get that this isn’t normal?” The rest of us kept a wide berth from the pantry from then on. Or, if we had to go in for a can of soup or a new box of cereal, we slitted our eyes and felt our way through.

  In my dream, I hurried out of the kitchen and went upstairs to the bedrooms, but when I tried to lie down, I fell right through to the floor; the beds were only illusions. I went back downstairs and tried to sit on the couch, but the same thing happened. When I picked up the phone it evaporated in my hand. Nothing had substance. Outside the front door, a voice instructed me to come out of the house slowly, with my hands in the air. I thought it was a police officer, but when I opened the door expecting to find Frank Garhart, I saw that it was Meggy instead, waiting to accuse me of trespassing. You don’t belong here, she said.

  The girls playing at my old house—their house now, I kept telling myself—looked up as I walked toward them. “Hi,” I said. I was standing in the exact spot from which my father had launched Meggy’s bicycle, the first time she balanced on a two-wheeler. From inside the house I could hear the sound of a bath running, and a television blared news from the family room.

  “Hello,” the older of the two sisters answered. All five of the girls were writing their names, with elaborate loops and curlicues, on the asphalt. Hers said Kelly, and out of the y she drew petals and stems.

  “Stop it, Kelly,” one of the other girls said, looking at me with a suspicion that penetrated my heart. “She’s a stranger.”

  “I used to live here,” I said, before I knew I was going to.

  Immediately the younger sister jumped up, and she dropped her chalk so violently that it shattered hitting the ground. “Mommy!” she wailed as she started for the house, in a voice that was not as truly frightened as it was self-conscious of its own dramatic effect. The other girls stopped drawing and looked as if they were merely interested in what would happen next. “There’s a ghost outside,” we all heard the little sister say, and Kelly and her friends smiled at me.

  “Courtney’s a little rambunctious,” Kelly told me. I recognized the calm superiority of an older sister. “She thinks you’re the girl who died.”

  “What’s going on out here?” I heard a woman’s voice from behind the front door, before it became visible in the form of a mother, holding the younger girl’s hand. When she saw me, she held the hand tighter—I saw the short squeeze—and drew the small head in close to her body, her hand covering the girl’s ear.

  “Oh, hi,” I said, feeling ashamed because instantly I did not like her, though I could not at first tell why. Then, in the next moments, I knew: the way she stood on the stones my father had arranged in the walk; the way she reached over, with her sandaled foot, to kick a clump of dirt aside—I hated the way she owned this place, which still felt like my home. “I was just telling your girls, I used to live in this house. I came back for a visit, to see the Lonergans. I just came over to say hello.” The more I talked, the more I hated her, because she didn’t smile in response to what I was saying; and the other girls must have sensed something in this, because they stood and seemed ready to run.

  “When did you live here?” Mrs. Crowell asked. “You mean, right before us?” She paused. “Are you a Dolan?” She made our name sound like a disease.

  “Yes.” Although I tried desperately to stop it, I felt my face begin to flush.

  “Okay, I see.” She turned her younger girl’s face up toward her, lifted her chin, and said, “Courtney, honey, it’s time for your bath. Go on up and get in with Kevin. Kelly, you go in, too. Girls—” she turned to the other three—“it’s the baby’s nap time, you need to go home.” Perfectly mannered suburban children, they all tossed their chalk into
a shoe box by the garage and took off across the lawn.

  “I didn’t mean to intrude,” I told Mrs. Crowell, feeling guilty for breaking up the game.

  “Then why did you?” she said.

  “Excuse me?” I thought I must have heard her wrong, but then from her face I knew that I hadn’t misunderstood. “I just wanted to see my old house,” I told her, as confusion and anger began to take hold. “There’s nothing so wrong with that.”

  “No, I know.” She sighed and pushed her hair back. “It’s just that the children—well, other kids tell them things. We thought it was best if they didn’t know, when we moved here, but it didn’t take long for the whole story to come out.” She dropped her eyes and continued talking to the stones on my father’s path. “When they heard about it, of course they got scared. They wanted to move out. Not the boys, so much, but the girls. Courtney still has nightmares. She’s afraid the girl—your sister?” She looked up, her lips moving nervously, and I nodded. “Died in her room.”

  “Which room does she sleep in?” I asked, although it was not what I intended or wanted to say.

  The woman pulled herself up and took a step backward toward the house. “Look, never mind. I’m sorry to be rude, but I’m going to ask you to leave. I just don’t want this whole thing opened up again. The kids were just getting used to it, they were just starting to forget.”

  If she had invited me inside, I would not have accepted. If she had shown me any kindness, if she had said, “I’m so sorry about what happened to you, if you ever want to come by and visit the house, feel free,” I would only have thanked her, put my foot out to touch one of the stones in my father’s walkway, and turned around.

  But because she was asking me to go—because I was not welcome—I couldn’t make myself leave. “Can I come in?” I asked. “Just walk through? It would only take me a minute. I wouldn’t say anything to the kids.”