The Unseen World

by Liz Moore

  Sincerely,

  Fred Coburn

  Olathe Public Library

  1920s–1930s

  Kansas

  “What’s wrong, Susan?” said Harold Canady, trying to be brave, though truly he didn’t want to know. He was ten years old. He was standing in a sort of shed, a hastily constructed little room with the sharp shadowy smell of rust. He was shivering: it was early March, and very cold. The year was 1929.

  His sister, Susan Canady, was crying. She was wearing her winter coat, which this year was too small for her. She was sitting on the dirt floor and leaning against a wall, despite the splinters she was sure to pick up from the rough unfinished wood. Her head was on her arms, which were folded over her knees. And she was weeping: Harold had heard her from outside. That’s how he’d known to come in. This shed was where they came, the two of them, to sort things out, and sometimes to avoid their father. Susan was his favorite person: she was five years older than he was, raucously funny when she wanted to be, pretty in a round unstartling way. She had only two dresses (her father thought that more would encourage vanity) but she took very good care of them, sewed well, arranged her hair in flattering mysterious styles.

  “Tell me what’s wrong,” said Harold again. He was on shaky territory. He tried to guess. Not their father: there had been no incident with him, not that Harold knew about. He would have heard it. Their house was small, and he was always in it (something Susan sometimes pointed out when she was feeling unkind—“Go outside, Harold, for once in your life,” she instructed him).

  It was something with a boy, then, he guessed. There had been several recently, hanging around: he had seen Susan with them at school and once on the main road, too. But when he proposed this—“Is it a boy?” he asked, embarrassed—Susan only shook her head violently, overtaken by her own sobs, drowning in them.

  It was not quite like seeing an adult cry—not quite—but it was almost as bad. For as long as he could remember, Susan had seemed untouchable, wise, well versed in everything Harold wished to know. She was, generally, composed, wry, knowing. She laughed loudly, her mouth open. She rarely cried. She protected him when it was important. She was popular at school and made him—if not liked—then tolerated, adopted as a sort of odd mascot. She rolled her eyes impeccably; she gestured with her hands in a way that fascinated Harold, who tried to imitate her until, one day, his father slapped his hands, told him he looked like a girl when he did that.

  Harold looked around the shed. There were six empty cans of whitewash on a high-up shelf. There were twelve bags of Diamond chicken feed below them. There were twenty-four small wooden posts, the start of a set of chairs, on the floor. The pattern distracted him.

  “I’m going to have a baby,” said Susan.

  He didn’t understand.

  “I’m expecting,” said Susan. She still had her head against her arms. Her voice was muffled. “Don’t you know what expecting is?”

  Harold bristled, as he did whenever he felt his intelligence was underestimated. Of course he knew what expecting meant. What he didn’t know, exactly, was how a person got a baby inside her. But he knew that it was not a thing that should happen to a girl of fifteen, an unmarried girl. He had heard whispers about other girls it had happened to in the past: the youngest parents of his friends, for example. People who got married at Susan’s age.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?” Susan asked, finally looking up. Her face was frightening: red and wretched, wet with tears. Her hair was matted into a sort of single mass, as if she had been sweating—though it was cold enough in the dim shed to make Harold shiver.

  “Have you told Daddy?” said Harold.

  “I’ll never tell him,” said Susan, so quickly and viciously that Harold flinched. “He’ll kill me. Do you understand? He’ll actually kill me. You can’t tell him, either.”

  Their mother did not enter the conversation. She did what their father said. She rarely made eye contact with either of them: out of shame, Harold thought sometimes, for being unable to protect her children. She had turned off some switch inside herself long before Harold was born. He wondered sometimes what she had been like as a child.

  “Promise,” said Susan, wild-eyed.

  “I promise,” said Harold.

  “Swear it,” said Susan.

  “I swear it,” said Harold.

  He wanted to ask her what she was going to do, but he had pressed his luck enough, he decided. He felt a vague sense of awe that Susan had told him as much as she had.

  The next day was Sunday, and on Sundays they spent the whole day in church. Susan looked woozy and faint. Harold studied her: Was she bigger? Was her stomach bigger? He couldn’t say. She had never been a small girl, and if she looked rounder now it wasn’t enough to draw attention.

  “Quit staring,” she hissed finally.

  Their father, from the pulpit, spoke frightening words about damnation. For most of Harold’s life, he had seemed like God: the decisiveness with which he cast behaviors and emotions into the categories of good and evil; the authority he bore naturally and gracefully, like a mantel over his impressive shoulders; the knack he had for knowing when anyone was lying. He bragged about this final quality; he was proud of it. “I’m everywhere,” he said to his children. “I know everything.” And it was also what he said about God.

  There was no library in their town. The nearest one was in Olathe, and sometimes when Mr. Macklin had to go there to visit a friend on a Saturday, he let Harold ride along beside him. He dropped Harold off at the Carnegie building on North Chestnut Street, which offered a surprisingly complete collection of both fiction and reference books. There, Harold spent long hours reading what he could find—including, at one point, the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Brittanica, from start to finish (except for Volume 12, Gichtel–Harmonium, which was missing, and therefore acquired added intrigue in Harold’s mind; he felt certain that he was being deprived of the most important secrets of the whole endeavor).

  The Saturday following his sister’s announcement, he sought out Mr. Macklin, who, by chance, was heading into town, and when he got to the library he went directly to the reference section, and selected from it Volume 22, and searched it for Pregnancy, glancing over his shoulder repeatedly and guiltily. But it yielded no results. Volume 3, however, contained within it an entry on Birth, which Harold quickly skimmed for useful details, anything helpful he could bring back to Susan, like a Labrador with a stick. The best-case scenario, he imagined, would be if he could find her a solution that might make the pregnancy go away: just disappear, sort of. Unmanifest itself, just as it had manifested itself, mysteriously, darkly, a curse that had befallen his sister. It did not seem to him that a child could be inside her: this was too much of an abstraction, to Harold. He couldn’t imagine it. In fact, it made him envious: he didn’t like the thought of Susan loving anything more than him.

  The encyclopedia, unfortunately, was not helpful. Mainly, it discussed the legal aspects of childbirth within the context of British jurisprudence. Unhelpful, Harold decided. Volume 23 was slightly more helpful, for within it was Reproduction (a word that Harold knew was vaguely connected to the situation Susan had found herself in, though he could not remember how he had learned this). There were one or two things he thought might be useful, and he wrote down notes on a little scrap of paper he had gotten from the librarian, in a code he had invented for himself several years before. He would bring it to Susan, and explain to her what he’d learned. But it wasn’t much: in general the language was so technical, so scientific, that he could not connect it to his sister Susan, who was vivid, pained, human. All week she had been wandering to school and back like a ghost. Their father had slapped her the night before, hard, for not listening: but Harold knew that she had only been distracted, not intentionally disobedient.

  “Harold,” his mother had murmured—his father’s name was Harold, too—but that was all she said.

  Susan did not put a han
d to her face. She did not alter her expression. Instead, there was an odd, forbidding calm about her, as if she had suddenly made up her mind about something.

  He rode home with Mr. Macklin, who was a kind and entirely silent person and the owner of one of the few automobiles in their little town, which made him impressive. He had reached the rank of commander in the U.S. Navy during the First World War, thus lending him an authority that surpassed the authority of anyone else in the town. He also attended the church over which Harold’s father presided, which was the only reason Harold was allowed to go with him when he was invited. In their small town, Harold was recognized as intelligent—someone who might be going places. This recognition meant, in his father’s mind, that Harold had sinned. He was too proud, he told Harold often. Not humble enough. But he respected Mr. Macklin (and also, perhaps, Mr. Macklin’s donations to the church), so when Harold was invited along, he was allowed to go.

  “Just make sure you’re not a nuisance,” said his father, each time Mr. Macklin picked him up. Therefore, on their drives together, Harold did not speak, but instead wondered what Mr. Macklin thought about in all that silence. He wondered whether Mr. Macklin—whether any member of the congregation—had an idea of the dual nature of his father, the Reverend Canady: the darkness of him that emerged at home, at night, or sometimes in the late afternoon. Could Mr. Macklin, could anyone in the pews on Sundays, imagine the sheer searing terror of being chased by an adult? Had they been chased by their fathers? Had they been beaten? Yes, Harold told himself; yes, this was a part of childhood. He had heard his friends at school talking about it resignedly, almost bragging about beatings they had gotten. Yet he felt—he knew—that what he received was different. And so he never joined in.

  When they returned, he thanked Mr. Macklin politely, descended from the vehicle, and walked toward the house. He felt in his pocket for the scrap of paper. Because it was in code, he would have to read it to Susan; he looked forward to it. It would make him feel needed, important. Perhaps she would thank him.

  But he knew something was wrong as soon as he entered the house. It was 6:00 in the afternoon, and his mother was out, and his father was home, sitting at the table, looking dangerous.

  Harold’s first instinct was to retreat to his bedroom, but he had caught the gaze of his father, and there was no leaving without words. His father measured him.

  “Where’s your sister?” he said lowly.

  “I don’t know,” said Harold.

  “Speak up,” said his father.

  “I don’t know, sir,” said Harold.

  “I think you do,” said his father.

  Harold was silent. He waited.

  “Your mother’s out looking for her,” said his father. “She was supposed to be back here three hours ago to finish her chores.”

  He stood up abruptly from behind the table, and Harold’s muscles tightened reflexively. He made himself smaller and firmer. He looked at the floor.

  “You’ll do them instead, I guess,” said his father.

  Harold looked down until his father was gone, out the door, to parts unknown. Only then did he breathe out. In those days, Harold prayed with some frequency; so he said a brief thoughtless prayer that his sister would not return that night, for he knew what awaited her when she did.

  Later, when Susan had still not returned, when the house was empty of her—at 10:00; at midnight; the next morning, when the terrible realization hit him for the first time that she might be gone for good—he tried to take it back; he prayed to undo what he had requested. But he knew, even while he was asking, that it was too late.

  Everything was worse with Susan gone. His mother stopped speaking almost entirely. Formerly she had found small outlets in Susan’s sometimes outrageous humor, allowing herself to laugh at her daughter’s antics whenever her husband was not home. Now Harold could not raise his mother, even for a moment, out of the lowness that overtook her, and that would last, as far as he knew, for the rest of her life.

  His father swerved wildly between two poles: one was repentance, loud pleas for first an explanation and then forgiveness, prostration before God; the other was increased and dangerous violence, directed at both Harold and his mother. (Harold, he presumed, had been Susan’s confidant—I know already, he had said, don’t lie to me—and in a moment of fear and guilt and shame, Harold had confessed that it was true. What followed was the most profound beating of his life. Several times, he thought that he would die. He did not go to school for two weeks, waiting for the wounds to heal; frequently, as an adult, he still felt a pain in his left shoulder, which had popped out of its socket with a sickening thut when his father jerked him back to stop him from running away.)

  The police found her, his sister Susan, exsanguinated in a field near Shawnee. She had been left there by some practitioner of bad medicine, some charlatan. How she had gotten to Shawnee in the first place, what pains she had taken to first learn about the procedure and then to find a ride, would remain a mystery for the rest of Harold’s life. He eyed the boys her age at school, looking for a culprit. He had a hunch about one of them, a shadowy boy who rarely spoke, but whom girls loved fiercely, sighed over, fought over.

  His father did what he could to prevent the story from spreading, but certainly people knew what had really happened. Harold knew, too, from eavesdropping when the police first arrived to tell them, though his father had sent him out of the room. He had stood just out of sight, around the corner, despite the risk he took to stay there. When the news was delivered, he had stopped himself from crying out by clamping his own hand over his own mouth. Later he had had to pretend not to have known, in front of his parents, when they broke the news to him again. There was such profound horror in both moments that each memory haunted him forever. First, the horror of the revelation: bled out, the policeman had said, bled out, bled out, bled out; next, the horror of his father’s delivery of this same news, mangled by his terrible, face-saving lies. An accident, his father had said. Caused by her own disobedience. He had heard people talking about it, too, at the school—the word abortion was not then used—but he understood, in a hazy childish way, what had occurred.

  At the funeral—which Harold’s father himself presided over, reveling perversely, Harold thought, in the attention and sympathy—his father had again called her death a tragic accident. He had not elaborated. He had stood at the pulpit, feigning a kind of labored stoicism. For the first time, Harold saw him with a clear, impartial eye: he recognized the narcissism that made his father thrill at the concern, the condolences, proffered by his congregation; he recognized that his father’s show of grief over Susan mainly stemmed from what people would think.

  For a time he believed Susan would come back. He never saw her body. He had asked to see it, wanting to say goodbye. Only Catholics viewed their dead, said his father, and certainly they were not that. He had feverish dreams in which she came to him, shrieking in pain, bleeding from every orifice. He had tender dreams in which she put a steady hand on his head, as if blessing him, and in those dreams he felt the presence of God more clearly than he ever had in his father’s church.

  Her absence made it clear to him that she had been the only tolerable part of his existence. She had teased him warmly, inventively; she had let him know that fun and lightness existed in the world. She had sheltered him from the worst of their father’s rages. She had pushed an older boy, once, for calling him a bad word: pushed him so hard that the boy had taken two long steps backward, saying, Whoa, whoa. She had been his family.

  He grew mute and tidy and invisible. He did not speak unless spoken to: not to his parents, not to his friends.

  It was around this time—ten, eleven, twelve—that thoughts he had pressed down deeply when he was younger began to spring up, as if they were seeds he had planted early in his life. As if it were now spring. His first thoughts were about two of the boys he grew up with. (Ignobly, they were the two most obvious choices, the best-looking boys in the
school.) He tried telling himself, at first, to push these thoughts away again, to bury them permanently. He tried telling himself that these thoughts were evil; but the person who had most emphatically convinced him of that—his father—was, Harold decided, himself the embodiment of most of the pain and suffering that existed in his world. The logic did not hold.

  He continued to go to the library with kind Mr. Macklin, and their mutual silence turned from an embarrassment to a comfort. He read everything. He asked for more from the librarian: specific tomes that he had seen referred to in the Encyclopædia Britannica, at the end of the entries he particularly liked. He read about far-flung places that seemed more civilized to him: Boston, Philadelphia, New York. Paris. Rome. Alexandria. California. In his spare time he worked through every famous math problem that had ever been solved, following the steps that had been taken already when he could not unravel it himself, studying it until he felt he understood. He taught himself well. He counted the days until he could leave home. And he vowed—to himself, to Susan—that when he did, he would never return.

  1980s

  Boston

  Ada paused briefly on Liston’s porch, closing her eyes, making a wish that nobody would be home. She had been absent since 11:00 the night before, when she snuck past a sleeping Liston on her way to the Woods. It was early afternoon now, the next day; she had just left Miss Holmes’s apartment, and there was no place else she could think of to go. She could not—did not want to—return to David’s. Besides, if anyone was looking for her, they would look there first.

  Would Liston be angry with her for disappearing?

  Would William be inside, pretending nothing had happened—pretending he had not recently changed her entire internal world in a permanent, irreversible way? Worse: Would Melanie be by his side?

  The front door opened. Ada opened her eyes.