by John Searles
I told him I would then reached for the door handle, remembering how he hugged me last time, how his stubble brushed against me as he pressed his lips to my cheek and the warm, earthy smell of him enveloped me. I wondered if he might do it again, but the moment did not present itself. Probably those four years between us, I thought, all the differences they made. And so I opened the door and got out, that newspaper clipping from inside his yearbook slipping off my lap and falling to the ground as I did. I reached down, picked it up. “What’s this?”
“Oh. That’s the other thing I meant to show you. The article that came out after the freak accident I told you about. The one that cost me my fingers.”
I glanced at the headline, some part of me expecting to see the name Albert Lynch, since those were the only stories I paid attention to anymore. Instead, the headline read simply: DECK COLLAPSES, DOZENS OF TEENS INJURED.
“You can hang on to it,” Dereck told me. “Personally, I’d rather forget that drunken afternoon. But like I told you, it was big news around here.”
I stuck the clipping in my pocket and thanked him again for the ride. Dereck flicked on his high beams and waited for me to get inside before backing out of the driveway. He beeped his horn a few times, and I flashed the porch light to say good-bye.
After he was gone, I went upstairs and changed and washed up before making my way back down to the kitchen. Rose had replenished the supply of Popsicles, but I was tired of them. Apparently, she had tossed whatever Emily Sanino had baked, since it wasn’t on the steps or the counter.
I skipped any sort of dinner and stood beside the kitchen table, reading the article Dereck had given me. The story confirmed everything he had told me about that accident and how he lost his fingers. Two photos accompanied the article. One showed the splintered deck in pieces on the ground, the toppled grill and kegs and broken chairs all around. The other was of the lawn scattered with teenagers, some lying on the grass as paramedics attended to them, others standing in the background, unharmed.
I was about to put down the clipping when I remembered Dereck saying that my sister had been at the party. Just as I’d done with his yearbook photo, I traced my thumb over the crowd until, sure enough, I spotted Rose standing blank faced in the crowd. I stared at her fuzzy black-and-white image a moment before noticing the person beside her too.
I must have stared at that image for a solid ten minutes until I put the clipping aside at last and went to the cabinet beneath the sink. When I swung it open, the garbage can was empty, a fresh bag placed inside. I shut the cabinet and looked at that clipping again, tracing my finger over the people in the crowd until stopping in the same spot. This time, I put the paper down and walked to the front door, stepping out into the moonlight and heading for the trash cans my sister must have dragged to the street earlier.
Back in Rehoboth, I’d lifted the lid and used my finger to puncture the bag. I did the same here. Once more, foul odors rose up as I dug inside, churning through the entire bag until my hands grew sticky from handling Popsicle wrappers and crumpled paper towels and squashed soda cans. When I finished with that bag, I reached for the one below. The work wasn’t strenuous, but something had me breathing heavily anyway.
And then I felt the first of what I was searching for: slim, like a firecracker between my fingers with the same sort of wick at the tip, blunt and brittle from use. And not long after I had found one, others began to appear. Like some rabid raccoon, I tipped over the can and knelt on the ground picking among all the papers and wrappers and trash smeared with frosting. And when I located them all—twenty-five slim pink candles—I held them up in the dark. Even though they’d long since been blown out, it didn’t matter. It was as though they lit the entire sky above. It was as though they lit my way when I stepped into the church that snowy night the winter before, because at long last, I knew who it was I had seen. At long last, I knew.
Chapter 20
Emergency Exits
May I please have seconds? I don’t want to be in the way . . . Sylvie? I have the same dream almost every night . . . When I say it is both good and bad, what I mean is that it starts out good—my mother is showing me the emergency exit rows, explaining about the lighted path in the aisles, the oxygen masks that drop from the ceiling—but peaceful as it begins, the dream always turns bad. It is that way with most things in life, my life anyway. Probably, it is the way things will go during my time here with you and your family—even though that is not what I want . . . My wish is that things stay good. My wish is that we stay friends, Sylvie, always and forever . . .
Even the greatest blizzards begin with one or two seemingly innocent snowflakes drifting down from the sky. That’s how it was with those simple words of gratitude—thank you—spoken by Abigail after she tucked herself into Rose’s bed and squeezed her eyes shut: they were the innocuous beginnings of all that was to come.
But I should not be talking about snowstorms, not yet. It was summer still, the sunniest and hottest I’d experienced in my life. Odd as it may sound, considering my sister had been plucked from our family and Abigail deposited in her place, it also came to be the happiest summer I recalled in a long time, that last summer my parents were alive.
When my father returned the following morning, he carried the empty suitcase Rose and I shared. She had no need for it there, I heard him tell my mother when she met him at the door, and seeing it would only keep thoughts of leaving the place thriving in her mind. Those weren’t his ideas, but protocol at Saint Julia’s, he explained. According to him, that same protocol prohibited family contact for the first ninety days to allow students time to detach from their former lives and acclimate to a new environment, one with rigid structure, firm values, and a strictly enforced disciplinary code. That was the most I heard him say about my sister, since my mother began telling him about all that had transpired in his absence—most important, how Albert Lynch and his daughter had shown up the day before, how she was with us still.
“With us?” my father said. “Downstairs?”
“No,” my mother told him. “Why don’t you come with me, Sylvester? I’ll show you.”
Since my mother had shut Rose’s bedroom door the day before, Abigail had not been outside the room and no one had been inside—as far as I knew, anyway. I assumed my father would make immediate adjustments to the sleeping arrangements, and since he left the suitcase by the stairs, I carried it to the second floor to see how things would play out. When I reached the top, though, my parents were already stepping out of Rose’s room and closing the door behind them. My father came to me, took the suitcase, and gave me a hug hello, before asking, “How would you feel, sunshine, if our guest stayed in your sister’s room a little longer?”
“Guest?” I couldn’t help repeating.
“Yes, Sylvie. You wouldn’t mind if Abigail stayed in your sister’s room while she’s here, would you?”
“What about that partitioned area in the basement? I thought—”
“You thought it was done. I know. So did your mother. But after all these years, that little project of mine has a ways to go still. There’s no electricity, for one. Not the best furniture either except for that cot and old dresser. So even though no one exactly invited our guest into Rose’s room, now that she’s there, it seems kinder to let her stay put. For a few nights anyway.”
The basement was good enough for all the other haunted people who had come here before, I wanted to say. But I held back because I knew the response he wanted—didn’t I always? And even though it left me feeling all the more guilty toward my sister, I gave it to him anyway.
In the days that followed, it hardly mattered. Whenever I was on the second floor, I stayed in my room with the door closed. Not a single time did I so much as glimpse Abigail. If she used the bathroom, if she descended the stairs to the kitchen, I never saw.
And yet, things remained quiet inside our house. My pa
rents slipped in and out of Rose’s room so discreetly it was as though they were coming and going from a confessional. Early mornings, I heard my mother’s gentle voice praying on the other side of the wall. Evenings, I heard her reading scripture. Most often, it was the same passage from deep in the Book of Philippians, one I came to know by heart; if Abigail was paying attention, she must have come to know it too:
Do not be anxious about anything. But in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your heart and your mind in our Lord Jesus Christ.
Those words were not intended for me, but I tried my best to heed them anyway. Fighting off any anxious feelings, however, became just that: a fight. It did not help that the phone kept shrieking at all hours, until at long last my parents turned off the ringer and let calls go to the answering machine. It also didn’t help that I woke some nights to the sound of a car motoring down our street, bass thumping, as people shouted from the windows about Penny and Satan and things they believed were happening in our home. And it did not help that, despite my father’s reports to the police and his careful work of regularly resurrecting the mailbox, we discovered it knocked over, along with our garbage cans, again and again.
The initial arrangement my mother made with Albert Lynch—that he should call in a few days and see about getting his daughter—was not mentioned. Instead, a few days turned to four, four turned to five, five to eight, and on it went. One afternoon, I glimpsed my mother slipping into Rose’s room, carrying a tray of food like some do-good nurse in a ward for the infirm, when it occurred to me that Abigail had been with us a total of two and a half weeks. Seventeen days, I thought, working out the math in my head.
By then, it was early July. The official holiday had come and gone, but backyard fireworks could still be heard, popping off now and then like distant gunshots in the night. Temperatures had spiked to such a sweltering degree that my mother took to preparing cold dinners—beet soup, tuna sandwiches, tomato and cucumber salads—meals she normally reserved for the thick of August. Window fans worked overtime, whirring all over the house, blowing hot air around.
On this particular evening, my mother must have felt tired of those nonsupper suppers, so she baked a vegetable lasagna from a recipe clipped out of the newspaper. The idea sounded good, but after the oven had been on for over an hour, it created a sweltering, junglelike atmosphere in our house. Nevertheless, we took our same old seats at the kitchen table.
“I remember,” I said, swatting a mosquito that had made its way inside, “when Rose and I were little, and it got this hot, you used to take us swimming at that pond over in Colbert Township.” It was a memory none of us had talked about in years, but I could still see my sister and me in our bright bathing suits, splashing in the water, burying each other’s feet in the rocky dirt on the shore. I waited to see if my parents remembered too.
My mother kept eating, or not eating exactly, but dissecting the dish she had prepared, segregating peppers from onions from tomatoes on her plate. During the previous seventeen days—since Penny had been put in the cage, since the light had been left on below, since Abigail had arrived and my father returned home without Rose—my mother had not uttered a word about feeling unwell. And yet, I couldn’t help but sense that something about her, something unnameable, was no longer the same and, if I was truthful with myself, had not been since our trip to Ohio.
The way my father’s gaze lingered on my mother in certain moments, as it did then, made me wonder if he noticed the change in her too. He waited to see if she might respond to what I’d said; when she didn’t, he told me he remembered those swims, adding that when he was little, his father took Howie and him to an Indian Well outside of Philly to cool off some summer afternoons. Then he asked my mother, “Didn’t you used to swim in a pond on the farm in Tennessee?”
My mother quit segregating her food and looked up. “Yes. But someone once drowned in that pond, so I was always afraid of swimming there. Plus, it was such stagnant water it made for a buggy place. I only went when I felt desperate for—”
She stopped abruptly, and my father and I waited for her to finish. Window fans whirred. Moths beat against the screens in a haphazard rhythm. More mosquitoes hummed in the air. All the while, my mother just stared at the entryway of the kitchen. And then we turned to see her in the white nightgown intended for my sister.
She looked different than she had that first afternoon. There was the fact of that gown—cleaner, more simple, than the tattered clothes she arrived in. There was the fact of her hair, brushed so all the curls had gone straight. There was also the fact of those bruises and scrapes on her feet, healed now, I discovered with a quick glance down. But there was something more to it than those physical details. I couldn’t help but sense a deep and noticeable calm about the girl, a calm that had not been there before.
“Well, hello, Abigail,” my mother said.
“Yes, hello,” my father said too.
“Would you like to join us?” my mother asked. Rather than wait for a response, she stood and quickly set an extra place at the table.
Abigail lingered in the entryway long enough that I thought she might turn and retreat upstairs. Finally, she walked to the table and slipped into Rose’s chair. None of us said a word as she placed her napkin on her lap, picked up her knife and fork, and took the first hesitant bites of dinner. She kept eating, quickly and simply, until her plate had been cleaned. Then she looked up and said in a smooth and serene sort of voice, “May I please have seconds?”
My mother nodded, and she helped herself to another portion. That’s when I made an effort to bring back the previous moment, asking my mother to finish what she was saying about the pond on the farm. She didn’t elaborate on the topic, though, telling us it was just a pond and not a very nice one at that.
At last, Abigail wiped her mouth and said, “Lake Ewauna. Or Lake Ewaumo.”
“Pardon?” my father said.
“When we used to live in one place. Out west. There were so many lakes near the ministry, one in particular we loved. I could never say the name, but it was something like that. We used to go swimming there. Only at night, under the moon, when no one was around.”
“That sounds lovely,” my father told Abigail.
She gave a shy smile and went back to eating.
“Maybe we could go to that pond in Colbert and swim some night,” I said, trying again to yank back the conversation. Pushing my luck, I added, “Just us.”
Those words should have had some effect, but Abigail kept her head down and went on eating. My mother told me she was not even sure the pond was still accessible to the public. “It was owned by some farmer, I believe. Ever since they opened the town pool, I never hear of people going there anymore.”
“You know what?” my father said. “All this talk of late-night swims has given me an idea. How about we go out for ice cream? It’ll help us cool off.”
All my life, we had never been a family that went out for ice cream. Back when we were younger, Rose and I used to get the idea in our heads and take to begging only to hear the same lecture from my father about how absurd it was to shell out money just so some kid could fill our cones. Instead, my mother kept a tub of sherbet in the freezer, or Popsicles when she wanted to give us an extra treat.
That night, my mother pointed out that she had both sherbet and Popsicles in the freezer, so there was no need to make a trip across town to the ice cream shop. Unlike my father as it was, he told her to forget that. “It’ll be good to get out of the house. Before we pass out from the heat or these mosquitoes eat us alive.”
“What about . . .” My mother allowed her voice to trail off, but he understood.
“Abigail,” he said, turning to the girl. “How do you feel about this idea?”
Her plate was empty again. I
wondered if she might ask for thirds. Instead, she just stared at it the way she had those photos of Rose and me, as though seeing something there no one else did. “I’ll be okay here by myself.”
That was all I needed to hear. I pushed back my chair and stood to rinse my plate in the sink with the intention of going up to be sure my bedroom door was locked before leaving. Nothing had happened to my horses since Penny had been put in the cage and Rose had been sent away, but I wasn’t taking chances. Then I heard my father say, “You’re misunderstanding me. I’m asking how would you feel about coming with us?”
“Sylvester,” my mother said. “I think perhaps—”
My father held up a hand, keeping his eyes on Abigail, so that my mother fell silent.
“Oh,” she said. “That’s very nice, Mr. Mason. But I don’t want to be in the way.”
“Don’t be silly. We’re happy to see you up and about.”
Maybe my mother did not tell him about that warning from her father, how the girl could seem normal—or almost normal—but that’s when she changed. Or maybe my mother did tell him, and he thought he knew better. Either way, even if no one else was thinking about Albert Lynch’s words, they whirred in my mind like those frantically spinning window fans. On the few occasions I’d been in Abigail’s presence, never once had she looked at me—not directly anyway. It was something I hadn’t realized until, there in our kitchen, she did for the first time. The effect was that of seeing some strange, poisonous flower bloom before my eyes, opening its petals and turning its face toward me. I watched as she lifted her gaze from her empty plate, fixing those wild blue eyes upon me, while speaking to my father in that serene voice. “Sylvie doesn’t want me to go.”
“Nonsense,” my father told her.
“It’s okay,” Abigail said. “If I were Sylvie, I wouldn’t want me to go either. It sounds like a family thing. And I get the feeling it’s important to her.”