The House on Primrose Pond

by Yona Zeldis McDonough

Alice added milk and sugar; she’d taken a few sips when the bell rang again. A certain something flickered across Alice’s face. Expectation? Hope? The bell sounded again and Susannah headed for the door.

  “Sorry, I forgot my key.” Jack stood there, shrugging the straps of his backpack from his shoulders.

  “Jack, come and meet our neighbor, Alice Renfew,” said Susannah. Whatever she’d seen on Alice’s face a moment ago was gone.

  “Hello, Jack,” said Alice. “I hope you like shortbread.” She nudged the tin in his direction.

  He took a cookie and began to eat. “Wow, this is awesome. You made these?”

  “I did.” Alice was clearly pleased.

  “You should get the recipe, Mom.” He hauled the gallon container of milk from the fridge and poured a glass. Then he noticed the poodle, which had been curled up near Alice’s feet. “Cool dog. Can I pet her?”

  “Her name is Emma and she would love that,” said Alice. Emma lifted her head at the sound of Alice’s voice. Jack stroked the puff of dark fur above the poodle’s eyes. The poodle blinked and then her long, elegant tongue unfurled to lick his wrist.

  “I think she likes me,” said Jack.

  “I think so too. She has impeccable taste.” Alice stood up. “I don’t want to take up any more of your time.”

  “Thank you so much for stopping by,” Susannah said.

  “And for the cookies,” added Jack. He was onto his second and a third was in his hand.

  When Alice had gone, Susannah left Jack to watch TV for a while; the kid needed to unwind before he tackled his homework. And even though she would need to get dinner going soon, she still wanted to look over today’s notes before she started. Alice’s visit had interrupted her, but sometimes an interruption turned out to be useful, because it enabled her to see things more clearly when she got back to work.

  The plot outline was her working tool; it would be fleshed out with scenes, conversations, and descriptions. She would turn these elements into the sample pages that would, she hoped, convince Tasha that Ruth’s was a tale worth telling. But she still wasn’t ready to start writing; she hadn’t heard the voice yet. And voice was always what started her on her way, her cue to begin.

  At first the voice was elusive, emanating as it did from another century—a whisper from behind a damask wall hanging or a velvet drape. Soon the voice grew louder. Listen to me, it said. Tell my story. Then Susannah began seeing images that embodied the voice: a woman in a crimson stomacher, seated at an inlaid escritoire where she was composing a letter; a different woman standing in front of a cheval glass as a maid laboriously tightened the laces of her corset.

  Susannah had not heard Ruth Blay’s voice, not yet. She was close, though; she could sense it. What if she used a first-person narration, telling the story in Ruth’s own voice? Then the book would have to end with her death, and Susannah had a feeling the story was bigger, and needed more space around it, more context. Third person would give her some distance but would also sacrifice the immediacy—and the impending horror.

  The winter sky was darkening outside the window as Susannah considered the shadowy but haunting figure of Betsey Pettingill, the child who had found the infant’s body in the barn. How would she have felt, knowing that she had played such a pivotal, albeit unwitting, role in this story? When did she fully understand what she had done? She was sure Betsey would have felt responsible for what happened to Ruth. Implicated in her hanging. And most obvious of all: she would have felt guilty, the weight of Ruth’s death sitting like a massive stone in her heart for the next one hundred years.

  Susannah thought of her last exchange with Charlie: the bicycle ride she had not taken, the helmet she had not reminded him to wear. The guilt for those two crimes—of omission, not commission, but what did it matter when he was dead, dead, dead?—had sliced a psychic wound inside her, a wound that would never heal. Had it been like that for Betsey too? At that moment, Susannah felt she would give anything to know.

  EIGHT

  The clarity Susannah had felt that night had vanished by the next morning. She woke with a dull, throbbing headache, and all the strands of her story-in-the-making were a tangled mess in her mind. After downing a pair of Tylenol tablets, she made coffee, hoping the combination would banish her headache and jumpstart her writing. But it did not do the trick. When the headache faded, she was left with a jittery, restless energy that propelled her from her desk to pacing around her room. When she was in a state like this, she yearned for some physical activity; even cleaning the house would work. Yes, that was a good idea. She’d do a deep clean of this room, setting the stage for her own creative process.

  First she changed the sheets and made the bed with military precision. Next she gathered the various articles of clothing strewn around and put them away. She’d dust, and vacuum too. And what about those windows? Already she was feeling better—more centered. But when she went to hang her black pants in the closet, her attention was diverted by the sight of the two-piece dress, the one she’d found in the attic. Just back from the dry cleaners, the dress was still wrapped in the transparent plastic through which Susannah could see the fitted jacket with its velvet collar and shiny jet buttons. The dress was demure, yet elegant. She had never seen her mother wear it; could Susannah even be sure it was hers?

  On the shelf above the rod where the dress was hung was the box with the book and the letter. Was there anything else here in the house? She’d combed the attic carefully, and she had brought down the portrait of her mother and set it on the dresser, propped against the wall. But what about the other rooms, like the bedroom? Her parents had slept in this room; maybe it too held some clues.

  Suddenly, cleaning the bedroom seemed beside the point and instead she began systematically going through the deep dresser drawers and the more shallow drawers in the night tables that flanked the queen-sized bed. Nothing of interest in any of these places. And the same was true of the bedroom closet.

  By now she was frustrated—two plans derailed. And she was hungry—she hadn’t had anything besides the coffee. She would have breakfast. But downstairs, the living room felt chilly and unwelcoming. What if she made a little fire? The basket where she kept the logs was empty, so she pulled on her parka, went outside, and crossed the snow-covered patch of ground that led to the woodshed. The small, peeling structure—she’d need to have it painted this spring—stood a few yards from the house, and she yanked on the stubborn door for several seconds before it yielded. She stepped inside.

  Two narrow windows set high in the walls let in a weak wash of light, and Susannah pulled a few of the logs off the top and set them near the door. Spiders scurried away and a dark shape darted by—maybe a mouse. Then she noticed something pink that was shoved down between the wall and the logs stacked against it.

  Curious, she got closer. The pink shape resolved itself into a faded floral pattern that included some other colors, mauve and lilac, as well. It seemed to be made of fabric. She had to climb over the logs to get at it, but even when she pulled hard it would not come free. She began moving the logs away, and despite the cold, she grew warm from the exertion. She also scratched her wrist, and a long stripe of blood rose to her skin. Damn.

  But finally she had moved enough of the logs away to retrieve what turned out to be a makeup case. The zipper was rusty and stuck, but after a little effort Susannah was able to get it open. Inside, she found a lipstick in her mother’s signature shade—Revlon’s Fire and Ice—a bottle of nail polish whose contents had solidified to a dark mottled mass, and, most puzzling of all, a bunch of yellowed newspaper clippings. When she opened them up, she saw that they were poems. Janet Durbin had mentioned that the Poet’s Corner had been one of her mother’s pet projects; maybe these poems had something to do with that.

  The light inside the shed was not conducive to reading, so she stuffed the poems back in the case and then balanced i
t on top of the logs so she could carry everything back to the house. She dumped the logs in the basket. The fire and her breakfast could wait; she wanted to read the poems now. One described a pond in summer: “hidden places / hidden spaces / iridescent green, with algae traces.” Was this Primrose Pond? There was one about an owl and another about some loons. Then she came upon one entitled “Say Yes.”

  The pale blue flowers on your dress

  So small, so shy

  Did they say yes?

  I heard your voice

  I watched you dance

  I made you mine with just a glance

  Though I would never dare to press

  Still I hoped you would say yes.

  Your lilting laugh

  Your sidelong glance

  I held you when you came to prance.

  We spun and twirled; no more, no less

  And yet it seemed you might say yes.

  Your ink black curls cascading down

  Your doelike eyes, so warm, so brown

  Your easy smile, so wide and free

  All these, did they say yes to me?

  It was signed, as they all were, by someone called I. N. Vayne. That was a nom de plume if there ever was one. Susannah read the poem over several times. In her youth, her mother had had a head of rather unruly black hair, a tangle of ringlets and corkscrew curls that she would gather up into a loose ponytail or messy topknot. Sometimes she let her hair down, though; her father always called it “Claire’s dark cloud” and told her how pretty she looked. In the portrait he painted, Claire’s hair was down. She also had large brown eyes; these too were visible in the portrait. Was it possible that the woman in the poem was Susannah’s mother? That the poet had written it to and for her? If so, he would have been courting her openly, right there on the page, for everyone to see.

  There was one last poem in the batch. She smoothed it out so she could read it.

  MORNING LOVE

  The dawn came gently

  first gray, then rose

  I turned, beheld you:

  a somnolent pose.

  The slope of your shoulder

  the curve of your breast

  so beautiful but when

  would you reveal the rest?

  Then your eyes flew open

  and joy was mine

  we kissed, we arched

  O joy sublime!

  Who cares about the dawn,

  be it gray or bright,

  when you are here, my love,

  my soul’s own delight?

  If “Say Yes” had posed a question, then “Morning Love” celebrated the answer. The lover’s query had been fulfilled and he’d claimed his beloved, in clear, emphatic language. Only this was no poetry class, no academic dissection of lines written by and to people she did not and would not ever know; if her suspicions were correct, in the first the poet was asking her mother to yield to his desire, and in the second he expressed his exultation that she had.

  Suddenly, Susannah felt sick. This was more than the leftover discomfort with a parent’s sexuality—way more. If she understood the sequence of the poems correctly, she was watching a stranger woo her mother away from her father, away from them and into another life. It was as if someone had grabbed a corner of the rug that represented her childhood and yanked it cleanly out from under her. Bang, she went. Down on the cold, hard floor. Oh God, she said softly to herself. Oh dear God.

  The scratch on her wrist, ignored and now an elegant brushstroke of blood, had started to throb. She brought the poems and the makeup case to her room. Then she went into the bathroom to wash her wrist and apply a coat of Neosporin. How had the makeup bag ended up in the woodshed? Had her mother hidden it there? Possibly. Claire had suffered from Alzheimer’s, and in the early stages, before she had been diagnosed, Susannah remembered episodes of hoarding and related behaviors: a stockpile of pastries, rotting and attracting ants, found under her bed, wads of cash stuffed into cereal boxes or the toaster. So it was conceivable that she’d put her makeup bag in the woodshed, but the timing wasn’t right—her illness began years later. Unless she had come back here, alone, without telling Susannah. Yet another secret she had kept from her daughter?

  Susannah picked up the phone to call Mabel Dunfee. But no one answered and she had to leave a message. The headache returned, full force, and now she was feeling the kind of chill that was often the prelude to getting the flu. Why was the house so damn cold, anyway? She made a fire and sat eating a bowl of granola in front of it.

  Better. That was much better. And when she had finished the granola and washed out the bowl and spoon, she returned to the fire and settled down on the couch to watch it for a few minutes. Instead, she dozed for what must have been an hour, her sleep punctuated by dreams in which she was back in the woodshed, pawing through the logs, only the logs somehow became animate and began to wriggle and writhe. The pulsating mass of them was quite horrible and she bolted awake, relieved that the only logs she could see were the ones in the fireplace, burning steadily and cleanly. The phone rang and she went into the kitchen to answer it. Mabel Dunfee was on the other end of the line.

  “Thanks for calling me back,” she said. “I just had a couple of questions I wanted to ask you about my mother.”

  “Your mother?” Mabel sounded confused.

  “I know it seems strange,” said Susannah. “But since I’ve moved back here, I’ve been finding things of hers tucked into the oddest places.”

  “I thought all her personal effects were in the attic,” Mabel said. “That’s what Ms. Jacobsmeyer told me.”

  “Yes, I did find some of her things there. My father’s too. But I’ve also found things in other places, like the woodshed, and somehow I don’t think it was the tenants who put them there. Do you?”

  “No. Your mother must have done it when she was back here.”

  “My mother was here?” Susannah’s voice was sharp. “When?”

  “I thought you knew.” Mabel sounded apologetic. “Linnie Ashcroft told me she’d come to town once. It was in between tenants. Mr. Gilmore didn’t come with her. Some boy from the university drove her up. Linnie said that they stayed overnight at that nice B and B on the pond—Meadow Flower Farm. She also said that your mother seemed a little . . . confused.”

  “I see.” The dream image of the dark squirming logs filled her head again.

  “Maybe I should have mentioned it when you came back,” Mabel said. “But it’s been so many years and, to be honest, I forgot all about it. Anyway, your poor mother’s long gone now.”

  “Long gone,” Susannah repeated. But in her mind it seemed as if Claire was very much alive and present. And that, like one of the characters in Susannah’s novels, she was desperately trying to make her voice heard.

  NINE

  From the front porch of her house, Alice watched the girl as she came up the road. She had stepped outside to deposit a neatly tied bundle of newspapers by the door; the next time she drove into town, she’d bring them to the recycling center.

  Alice had seen her a couple of times, hair as bright as a flame against all the white and gray of the surrounding landscape. And she knew who she was too. Her erstwhile neighbors, the Gilmores, had a daughter, Susannah, who’d moved back into the house with her two children. Claire and Warren were, Alice recalled, a pleasant, if mismatched, couple, Claire all light and shimmer—how could she, of all unlikely people, have succumbed to dementia?—the husband, Warren, gentle but earthbound, a plodding soul. That he’d ever managed to win her was an unsolved mystery.

  A week or so ago, Alice had gone to visit Susannah hoping she might meet the girl. It had not happened, but Alice knew there would be other opportunities. And look—here she was again. The girl walked—or trudged, really—with her head down. She did not look happy. In fact, she looked downright glum,
which was just the way she’d looked the two other times Alice had spied her. Something was weighing on her, poor dear. It was a pity too, what with those looks: tall, slim, nice posture. And the hair, of course. The hair that was a veritable gift from God. Everyone always went on and on about blondes; Alice had been blond as a child, and even though her hair had darkened somewhat, the skillful handiwork of her colorist had allowed her to maintain the illusion for years. But to her eye, red was the far more interesting color, so commanding and improbable.

  Then the girl did an unexpected thing. She stopped, ducked under the fence, and walked across the snowy meadow to the barn. She must have seen Jester. When the weather wasn’t too cold, Alice opened the top of the stall to give him a little light and air.

  The girl walked right up to him but did not attempt to touch him right away, as people tended to do. Instead, she waited, letting Jester take her measure. Only then did she extend her hand to rub the place between his nostrils. Jester exhaled mightily. How had she known this was his favorite place?

  Alice stepped off the porch and began to walk across the snow. She wasn’t wearing boots and her feet felt the cold instantly. Still, she did not want this moment—or this girl—to slip away. Redheaded, brooding, and with an instinct for horses, she seemed unusual, and Alice wanted to get to know her.

  “Do you ride?” Alice called out.

  “Excuse me?” The girl turned. There were a few freckles on her nose and upper cheeks; otherwise, her skin was very pale.

  “Horses. Do you ride horses?”

  “I used to,” said the girl. “When I was younger.”

  Younger? thought Alice. Why, you’re younger than springtime. Younger than the newest buds. But all she said was, “You seem to know how to handle him.”

  “I love horses. I went to an equestrian camp for a few summers. I always wanted a horse of my own, but my parents said no.” She continued to stroke Jester’s muzzle.

  “You lived in the city,” Alice said. “That wouldn’t have been practical.”