by Andrew Pyper
At the mention of blood I notice, for the first time, the spots on the woman’s most exterior sweater, a cardigan with the pockets hanging off. A fine spatter around her middle. Along with crumbs of earth, field dirt. Smudges here and there on her clothes and under her nails.
“What’s that?”
She looks down. Wipes at the blood and soil with the back of her hand.
“Don’t know how that got there, to tell the perfect truth,” she says, though with what could be a tremble of uncertainty now. “But when you work a farm, you stop wondering how the dirt and such gets on you.”
“Doesn’t seem there’s been much work around here for a while.”
Her eyes look up at me, instantly drained of warmth. “You calling my sister and me lazy?”
“It came out awkwardly. Forgive me.”
“I’m not in the forgiving business, Mr. Ullman,” she says, suddenly smiling again. “You want that? Get on your knees.”
I can’t tell if she means this literally or not. Something hard behind her smile suggests this last remark wasn’t a joke, but a command. There’s no choice but to pretend I hadn’t noticed.
“The voices you heard,” I say. “The ones that called you down to the cellar.”
“Yes?”
“What did they say?”
She ponders this. A brow-scrunched search of what seems a distant past, as though I’ve asked her the name of the boy who sat next to her in kindergarten.
“It’s a funny thing,” she answers finally. “But though I know it was words, I can’t recall them as words. More like a feeling, y’know? A sound that put a feeling inside you.”
My tinnitus on the drive to Linton. A sound that put a feeling inside me.
“Could you describe it?” I ask.
“An awful thing. You’d rather be doubled over sick. You’d rather drive a nail through the back of your own hand.”
“Because it was painful.”
“Because it opened you up from the inside out. Made things so clear they were cast in pure darkness instead of light. A darkness you could see better than any light.”
No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv’d only to discover sights of woe
“This may seem a strange question,” I say. “But have you ever read John Milton? Paradise Lost?”
“Not much of a reader, sorry to say. Other than the Good Book, of course. Too busy with the day-to-day.”
“Of course. Can I go back to that feeling you mentioned? What did you see in that visible darkness?”
“What real freedom could be. No rules, no shame, no love to hold you back. Freedom like a cold wind across the fields. Like being dead. Like being nothing.” She nods. “Yes, I believe that captures it. The liberty of being nothing at all.”
I know something about that. It’s the feeling I carried with me from Santa Croce 3627 to the Bauer Hotel. The disease that infected Tess. Made her fall. Like being dead. But worse. An unnatural death because it was more final than death. Like being nothing.
“Where’s Delia now, Paula?”
“She went down to the cellar just before you came.”
“The cellar?”
“Said she had to straighten something out. Now that I’d come home and all.”
“Do you mind if I go down and have a word with her?”
“Be my guest. Not that I’ll be joining you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m afraid.” She looks at me like I’m dense. “Aren’t you?”
I don’t answer that. Just move away from the table to the closed door I somehow know opens not onto a closet or pantry or back stairwell up to the second floor, but down into the broad hole beneath the house.
Paula watches me grasp the handle and turn it. The sensation of her eyes on my back, pushing me forward to stand at the top of the stairs. Her finger stroking the ring of the coffee cup faster now so that the ceramic issues a wavering note of warning.
A light switch turns on a pair of bulbs below, though I can’t see them yet from this height, only the two yellow aprons they cast upon the concrete floor. And then, halfway down the stairs, the one to the left goes out. Not the pop that comes from burnout, but the fizzle of being too loosely screwed into the socket. I could walk over through the dark and fix it with a single turn. Yet that’s a less-inviting prospect than keeping my eye on the remaining circle of warmth to the right.
When my feet make it to the floor, I can take in some of the details the light offers. Worktables against the walls, cluttered with tools, shears, Mason jars full of lugnuts and screws. Antique paint cans stacked in teetering towers. Paper yard-waste bags piled in the far corner, their bottoms black from their slowly liquefying contents.
It is these bags that emit the smell. A decidedly organic rot, pervasive and strong. The back-of-the-throat tickle of burnt-sugar icing.
No Delia to be found. She could be in the dark to the left. But even if she sat on the floor knitting socks I wouldn’t be able to see her. Only now does it occur to me that, prior to my turning on the light switch, she would have been in total darkness herself. If she’s down here at all.
What was I thinking, trusting an old lady dirtied with blood and soil who’d just returned from a ten-day sojourn without knowing how she’d spent the time? An old woman with a gift for hearing things the rest of the world prays to never hear? A liar—because no coffee had touched that cup this morning. There was no smell of it in the kitchen, either, no pot on the stove.
I wasn’t trusting her, of course. I have had to dispense with the deliberations that trust requires. There isn’t time. The downside of the headlong advance, however, is skipping straight into a trap. And this is a trap. Paula is probably closing the door at the top of the stairs right now. Wasn’t there a latch on the outside, silvery and new? She must be slipping the padlock through even as I back up and make the bottom step. Clicking it shut—
“Over here.”
A voice like Paula’s—but not Paula’s—stops me. Lets me see that the door at the top of the cellar stairs remains half open just as I left it.
As I turn, there is a metallic scrape along the floor. And there she is. Delia Reyes. Pulling an overturned washtub into the range of light and sitting on its edge with a weary sigh.
“Good morning,” I say.
“Morning. Is it? You take the sun away and you can lose track of time down here.”
“You didn’t turn the lights on.”
“Didn’t I? You live in a place long enough and I suppose some things you can see just fine in the dark.”
At first, I’d taken her slouch and hooded eyes for fatigue, the posture that follows the completion of some physical task. Yet, with this last sentence, it strikes me that I am wrong. Despite her friendliness, her words are hollowed out by an immeasurable sadness, reedy and thin. I know because it’s how I hear my own voice now, too.
“My name is David Ullman. I came to—”
“I heard,” she interrupts, lifting her eyes to the ceiling. “Half heard.”
“You must be delighted. About Paula.”
She returns her eyes to me. “Are you real?”
“As far as I can tell.”
“What have you done?”
“I’m sorry. Not sure that—”
“If you’re here you must have . . . ”
She lets the thought drift away. Draws a hand over her face as though to pull off a cobweb.
“You find it cold down here?” she asks.
“A little,” I say, though in truth, within the last few moments, the cellar’s temperature feels like it’s dropped ten degrees or more.
Delia rubs her shoulders. “This was always a cold house. Even in the summer it never warmed up, never got all the way into the corners. Like the rooms themselves hated being touched by the sun.”
She appears as though she is about to stand, then changes her mind. A mind that’s been transported to a particular sliver of the past.
/> “Me and Paula always going around in long coats in August,” she says. “And scarves’ round our ears on Christmas morning!”
Her laugh is reminiscent of her sister’s, but unlike the latter it signals loss rather than amusement.
“A good thing you had each other out here,” I say.
“Maybe so. Or maybe there’s such a thing as being too close to somebody.”
“How’s that?”
“Twins. You can lose grasp of what’s what in a cold house for sixty years. And just another you to talk to. Another you to look at.”
I take a step closer. It’s what she seems to require. A hand on her elbow to help her to her feet. Someone to tell her it’s all over, there’s no need to dwell on some long-ago misgivings down here in the foul-smelling dark. Yet at my approach she lifts a finger to stop me. There’s the curious feeling that she wants not only to finish her thought, but prevent me from coming too close.
“I prayed to heaven to take her away,” she says. “It’s a shameful thing, but it’s true. Since I was a girl I’ve had days when I wished for my sister to get her arm caught in the thresher or fall asleep at the wheel on a drive back from town or get a chunk of stew caught in her throat and not find the air to spit it out. I could see the ways it might happen. So simple. Terrible things to wish for! But all of it seeming perfectly natural. Accidents.”
She’s crying now. A messy sound that remains separate from her voice, so that it’s like she is performing an act of self-ventriloquism, sobbing and throwing her speaking voice at the same time.
“Why would you wish for an accident?”
“So I could be alone for once! Not one half of a whole, not what folks called us all our lives. Not the Terrible Twosome or the Reyes Twins or The Girls. Just myself.” She swallows, but she goes on without clearing her throat, so that her voice is even quieter. “I prayed. But heaven never did a thing. So then I started praying the other way. This time, something answered.”
“We should go now,” I say.
“Go? Why?”
“Your sister came home. Remember?”
“I killed my sister.”
“No, Delia. She’s okay.”
The old woman shakes her head. “I killed her.”
“But I was just talking to her upstairs. Paula’s not missing anymore. She’s here.”
“That . . . thing. That’s not Paula.”
“Who is it?”
“The one who answered my prayer.”
The old woman lifts her hand to point at a place over my shoulder in the darkness behind me.
There is no choice in it. I can’t let there be a choice in it.
I turn from her and move forward with my own shadow cast ahead of me as another layer of dark. I keep my hands raised so they might catch hold of the other bulb’s string hanging down from its switch. Just when it feels like I’ve gone too far it tickles over my cheeks. My fingers follow it up to the bulb. Screw it in tight. The heat tells me it’s back on before the revelation of its light.
The sisters sit side by side in the corner. Their backs against the far wall, at the edge of the light’s reach, so that their faces are illuminated but only dimly so. It is enough to see that they are real. That the shotgun lying across Delia’s lap, the dark, fresh wet against the bricks from the exit wound at the back of her head, the gaping mouth where the barrel had been placed, is real. That Paula’s remains, speckled from the dirt that clings to her, the root-ends and pebbles from the ground she’d been dug up from, the skin purpled with bloat, is real.
There is a handful of seconds between the apprehension of this image and the first grappling with what it means. And it is in this time of the brain rushing to catch up that the rest of the body jumps ahead. It swings me around. Prevents me from being sick right here right now.
“Why did you bring her here?” I ask Delia, who now sits rubbing a knuckle under her glistening, running nose.
“It asked me to.”
“Tell me its name.”
“Doesn’t have one.”
“They’ll think you did it.”
“I did do it.”
“It told you to.”
“It told me I could.”
“But everything you’ve said to me—the thing I spoke to upstairs, your prayers—nobody will ever know.”
“You know.”
Now it’s the other bulb’s turn to flicker and extinguish. The Delia I have been speaking to returns to darkness.
“You know you’ll kill, too, don’t you?” she says, much closer now.
“No . . . ”
“That’s what it wants. For you to know what it does. To show how you can do it, too. For you to believe. To kill.”
The old woman is so close I can read the outline of her face inches from mine even in the darkness. The stained ivory of her smile.
“Someone close,” she whispers.
I step backward and start up the stairs. Slowly at first, making sure of my footing on the narrow steps. Then running for the top, my breath a labored heave in my own ears. Bounding through the kitchen—the single coffee cup still there, the chair empty—and out the door to my car.
I peel out of the farmhouse’s yard and gun it down the lane to the road, slapping at the wheel to make the turn and knocking against the REYES mailbox post with my bumper as I go. The mailbox pops its door open, so that when I glance back at it a couple hundred yards on it looks like a stooped figure lurching after me, its mouth wide in a scream.
16
I DRIVE SOUTH. IT SEEMS LIKE THE LEAST PREDICTABLE DIRECTION. East is where I’m from, the logical direction of retreat. And north is Canada. Not a desirable option for me. I left there a long time ago in the name of drawing a line between what I came from and what I could reinvent myself as being. I’ve got enough on my hands at the moment as far as spirits go without some long-buried ghosts wriggling up for a visit.
So farewell North Dakota, hello South Dakota. Just when I’m thinking there’s never been a less necessary reason for a border, I roll into Nebraska, which looks more like North Dakota than North Dakota. Finally, Kansas. Not especially distinct from the previous states but with a whiff of fame about it, Dorothy and Toto and mobile home parks flattened by twisters. There is something, too, about the look of the fields (or the look of the day) that reminds me of the crop duster sequence from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. Cary Grant ducking from the plane’s buzzing attacks, wondering what the hell he’d been dragged into. One of O’Brien’s favorites.
And now, all at once, the thought of her clenches at my heart. How much I miss her. How a drive across the flats can double the loneliness of an already lonely journey.
How terribly, unshakably frightened I am.
THE ROAD CAN WIPE THE MIND CLEAN. IT CAN ALSO PULL UP MEMORIES at random, disordered and careless, throwing them against the windshield so hard you jump back in your seat at the impact.
Just now, for instance. My first camping trip with Tess.
Diane wasn’t much for what she called the “out-of-doors.” It left me alone to drive up into the Adirondacks with Tess when she was five so that I could teach her some of the skills I’d learned in my northern Ontario youth: building a fire, storing food up a tree to keep out of the reach of bears, the wrist-turn required for a smooth J-stroke.
On the drive we played I Spy and co-composed some of the naughty limericks Diane forbade at home (There once was a girl named Dotty / Who tooted when she sat on the potty). The truth is I was worried the whole way up. About rain, about mosquitoes, about not having fun. Tess being a born New Yorker, I didn’t want her to be freaked out by all the discomforts encountered over a couple nights in the woods. More than this, I didn’t want to fail. To return home with a kid blotchy with poison ivy and promises from her father to never try that again.
Instead, we had a great time. Butterflies that landed on Tess’s shoes after she stood as still as a statue for almost an hour in a blueberry patch, pretending to be “a gia
nt flower” until the Monarchs fluttered close, trusting her. Night swims in the lake, the movement of our bodies twisting the reflected moon over the still surface. Perfecting the stick rotation required for evenly roasted marshmallows.
Though all of this comes back to me later. After the memory that has me coughing for air as I drive through the endless fields.
After our second day, Tess asked that I wake her up in the middle of the night so that she could see what I described to her as “the real stars.” She didn’t believe my talk of the Milky Way, of skies where the needlepoint of light matched the dark. I set my watch for three AM. When the time came we unzipped the tent and stood in the middle of our campsite, tilting back our heads. The dome of sky ablaze.
Neither of us spoke. Just returned to the tent after a while, went back to sleep. And in the morning, we woke at the exact same time. Looked at each other and started to laugh. Not a laugh at or about anything. Not a silently shared thought. Just the two of us meeting the dawn with spontaneous gratitude.
This is what nearly pulls me over to get my breath back and stop my hands from shaking on the wheel: I remember, even as the moment was happening, having the clear thought that This is the happiest you have ever been.
And it was.
Still is.
AN HOUR OUTSIDE WICHITA I STOP AT A SERVICE STATION AND STEP into a phone booth that smells of mustard and fart.
“Look at me,” O’Brien says when she picks up. “Sitting by the phone like a teenager without a date for the prom.”
“Would you come to the prom with me, Elaine?”
“Not a chance. I’m never forgiving you.”
“Why not?”
“You haven’t called, nimrod.”
“Been a while since I’ve been called that.”
“Really? Then let’s make up for lost time. Where are you, nimrod?”
“Kansas.”
“Where in Kansas?”
“Just outside Wichita. Probably stay there tonight. I passed a billboard for the Scotsman Inn a couple miles back. Figure I’ll check out their haggis.”
“Haggis in Kansas.”
“Say that three times fast.”
“How did things go in North Dakota?”