Those letters began as if pressed firmly then disappeared as they angled upwards. Krista read the note as lazily as she savored the remainder of the bar of chocolate:
This is where I remember fear, pure physical fear. Fear of surgical instruments, the furtive faces, and, of course, blood. If I were to paint an abstraction of that hole-in-the-wall place, it would contain black, white, steel grey and naturally red. Buckets of red. However, it was over very quickly, physical pain was kept at a minimum. The cost was high.
The relief is tremendous. But the guilt, for curtailing a life, has hung on a lifetime, my constant companion. My warden. There was a feeling of being defiled, but I believed that stemmed from the sordidness of the surroundings, that dark hole on the Upper West Side. I don’t think the defilement, the guilt, would have occurred if the operation had not been illegal. This I will never know for sure.
But this painting, I cannot paint. This is the painting in which I live. This house. This Island. This canvas.
It ended abruptly. Krista read it again in disbelief. This randomly found note had appeared at first just like the others Ilsa left here and there: in drawers, in books, in smock pockets. They usually contained ideas for paintings, schemes for the garden, plans for a renovation or a holiday ornament.
Krista tried to imagine her grandmother’s note as purely a sketch for a painting. She considered the canvas it might have produced. I have never seen this painting. The colors did not ring true. The possibilities were unlike anything her grandmother had ever painted. Krista focused on the landscape above the mantle and heard her grandmother tease her: “You tell me, Krissie, you tell me what season it is.”
I don’t know.
The shoreline wavered around a brilliant green knoll, which in turn supported a lone tree with a rough trunk, its branches raised high into the sky. There, for the first time, Krista saw steel grey, a surgical shade of steel grey, dominate. It wasn’t a question of sunset or sunrise, spring or fall. Beyond the iridescence Krista always saw in Ilsa’s paintings, she now saw a sweeping, distinct crescent of red, the color of blood, cut into the canvas, deftly bordered by sweeps of amber. The traces of black, white, steel grey and red became paramount, and again she heard Ilsa say, “You tell me, Krissie, you tell me what season it is.”
Krista read the note again. Ilsa had an abortion. An illegal abortion. When? Where? The questions raced through her mind. The Upper West Side, a dark hole. It had hurt; she had felt guilty. Krista seemed to hear every door in the house lock. Upstairs a door slammed again.
“No,” she said aloud.
I am not guilty. I am not hurt. I am choosing to live here as Ilsa did: because she wanted to, because she loved the Island. She was an artist. She was not guilty, not hurt. I knew my grandmother.
Krista stared at the painting, the darkness she had never seen in it before. In the hall, a vacuum cleaner leaned against a set of golf clubs. The dust rag rested on the pile of papers and magazines where she had left it. In the dining room, the candlesticks stood in the wrong place on the wrong table. The cellar door was ajar. Pieces of torn linen hung from the shopping bag.
My abortion was legal. I am not guilty. It is not a sin. I did not commit a crime.
She considered the choice she had had, unlike her grandmother. But I felt the same. I too curtailed a life. She felt yesterday’s nausea come back. She understood her fear, her power. It was one she felt a man could never understand. An authority beyond legislation.
I will stay.
Krista picked up the dust rag. Maybe this is a sort of penance. Maybe like Ilsa…
Upstairs a window slammed. Krista heard the brief ticking of a clock that for some reason loosened the last spiral in its spring. My fate is sealed. I will remain here, forever, in the summer house, keeping her secret and mine.
The aftertaste of chocolate in her mouth was bitter. For the first time, she understood Ilsa’s paintings. Her depictions were gay, full of beauty, but rich only because of the under painting, the colors that, once seen, cut like a knife.
“You tell me,” Krista said out loud, “you tell me what season it is.”
So that was the reason, she thought, that was the reason I felt Ilsa so close, as if she were sitting on my bed, chiding me in that way she always had. Krista held the folded note in one hand as she blew dust off the mantelpiece. She noticed that the cut in her palm still stung, and watched the small, dark shadows from the glazing bars in the windowpanes dance on the living-room floor. She felt guilt, her own and Ilsa’s. The house no longer seemed a joyful place, a haven. To stay here did not feel like a choice. The summer house will be the price I pay. I curtailed a life, Ilsa curtailed a life. We are criminals. Who really has the right to take a life?
“God,” she said out loud, “and men at war.”
Krista wept. She sat on the hearth, and for the first time had a clear sense of her power to create and destroy. She felt inadequate and afraid. Was it wrong to give women the right of God? She imagined what it might be like if not one unloved child were born into the world, if a woman were never to suffer for her decision, and if people were not afraid of death. Even if, she thought, the question of the maimed, the crippled and the sick were left aside, and just the unloved children aborted – what would that mean? What if no unloved child would be born into that sort of poverty? How would the world change?
Ivy scratched at the front door. Tires crunched the gravel in the driveway, and the quick setting of an emergency brake preceded footsteps hurrying up the brick path. The bells under the arch covered with Baltic ivy rang, and someone pounded heavily on the kitchen door.
“Krista,” Michael’s voice demanded, “are you there?”
Chapter Nine
Michael continued to knock and to rattle the latched screen door. Krista dropped the dust cloth to the floor, stepped out of her wooden-soled sandals, and moved toward the foyer, then up the carpeted stairs. He mustn’t know I’m here. I’m not ready to talk to him, she decided. First she considered the airing cupboard, where the winter blankets now remained all year, then the steamer with its piles of old tea towels and satin quilts, but the key was missing and the lid locked tightly into place. She considered the fireplace in Ilsa’s studio, behind the screen. Looking up, she saw a charcoal sketch, one of her father’s first drawings, guided by the hand of a young Ilsa.
“Dad, Ilsa… help me,” Krista whispered. “I don’t want him here. I don’t want him to find me.”
She eyed her bed. The height of the frame from the floor was too low. The banging on the back door stopped, only to resume at the front, even louder than before. Krista remembered the cellar door. It was not latched. Could she make it down there before he discovered it?
“Krista, open the door!” Michael shouted.
She held still.
“Kris, listen to me,” he pleaded
She looked at the stripped bed. Not here.
The bathroom? The linen closet? Krista wanted only to disappear. She guessed he had already seen the car in the garage. How else could he know? Perhaps the open blinds and windows. Back in the studio, she rested her hand on a large empty frame. As Michael continued to pound the doors and call out, she spotted the tall Indian screen that concealed the door to a low-ceilinged attic room beyond, the one in which Ilsa’s paintings were stored along with some old books and an ancient baby carriage. Krista recalled the stuffy space in which on many a summer afternoon she hid from Ilsa, saved from taking a nap, only to fall asleep there beside a china doll whose eyes opened and closed depending on whether she was sitting or lying down. Krista stepped behind the screen, lifted the sagging door carefully, and hid in the space behind.
“Kris, I know you’re in there. I don’t want anything from you… just to know you’re okay.”
“I’m okay,” she said under her breath, settling back against a large easel. She realized she still held Ilsa’s n
ote, and pressed it to her lips. Michael, please, please, please, just go away.
The knocking continued. If anything, it increased in volume. Michael was now at the back door again, standing immediately by the cellar entrance. If she peered out the tiny attic window, she knew she would be able to see him. She crawled to it, knocking over a coffee tin full of brushes, which she stopped from rolling with her heel. She watched him. He pounded twice, called out her name, a despairing expression on his face.
He slumped down on the cement stoop, resting his forearms on his knees. “Kris!” he called up to the attic window.
She quickly backed away. Did he see me?
“Kris, open the door. You are out of your mind. Open the door.”
He slammed his fist against the cellar door in frustration. The blow reverberated through the house. The door swung in slightly under the blow, and he stared at it. In seconds, Krista could hear the creaking of the hinges as he found the way in. She closed her eyes and scooted to the far corner of the attic, pushing the baby carriage in front of the door.
In the basement, Michael knocked over a bicycle and tripped on the stairwell. His voice reached her, muffled by the floorboards that separated them. “Kris, this is crazy! I know you’re here. Please answer me. Just tell me you’re okay.”
“Ilsa, please,” Krista prayed, “send him away.”
As soon as she said the little prayer, she felt enormously safe. Krista did not understand how Ilsa could do it, but she knew Michael would not come poking about upstairs. He would not go that far, she was certain, and relaxed, deciding it was only a matter of staying very still until he gave up and left. Again, she leaned against the easel, guessing where he was by his voice and the different sounds of his footsteps, on the carpeting or the hardwood floors.
Michael dialed the phone. Krista jumped, catching the familiar sound. Wasn’t the phone dead? Hopefully… It was not. Just as the water and the gas and the electricity had never been cut off, so the phone had remained ready for use.
She heard Michael say, “Mr. Bourne, please.”
What right does he have to call my grandfather? she thought angrily while he waited to be put through. Maybe this is a trick. She remained still.
“She’s here.” Michael paused. “No. The cellar door’s unlocked. The stereo’s warm. There’s been a fire in the front room. I found a pair of sandals… I don’t feel comfortable being here. I don’t want to dig around. If she doesn’t want to see anyone this might not be a good idea.”
Krista listened.
“All right,” Michael continued. “Did you get a hold of Helen? I’ll keep looking.” He hung up.
The house fell silent for a moment only to echo to Michael’s steps on the front stairwell. He was directly under Krista. She was surprised he couldn’t hear her heart beating.
“Krista.” He slugged the bedroom door and rattled the knob on the locked storage closet in the front room. He made his way through the bathroom and bedroom. Krista remembered the bedspread on the floor, her clothes in the bathroom.
It doesn’t matter. So what if he knows I am here or that I have been here? He knows nothing else, and until we are face to face, he can know nothing for sure. I just do not want to confront him, nothing else matters. I do not want to confront him.
The closet door in her room opened and closed. The footsteps approached the Indian screen, stopped, and turned away. Michael flipped through a sketchpad, the pages sounding one after the next. “Your grandmother was pretty good,” he announced. “All right,” he said, sighing aloud, “I give up. Have it your way, but I know you’re here.” And he kicked the Indian screen so hard that it toppled over, leaning against the door to the attic room. “Have it your way.”
He walked out the front bedroom, down the stairs to the kitchen. Krista kept still, clutching Ilsa’s note in her hand. She started to go after him, and pushed against the door, but the toppled screen prevented her from getting out. She could not call out to him. Something prevented her. Despite herself, the call for help stuck caught in her throat.
He halted in the dining room, again raising his voice to call to her. “You think I’m stupid? You think I didn’t see the car in the garage? You’re written all over this place, but I’m not going to smoke you out. You can come after me when you’re good and ready. Did you hear me? I am not coming back.”
He unlocked the kitchen door and let himself out. The door slammed shut again. Krista listened to his steps on the gravel, the car door banging, and the engine noise as he backed out of the driveway.
She pushed against the door. It remained closed. She sat back down, still holding the note. The house settled, bird-like, after the recent incursion, as if smoothing ruffled feathers. She started to cry, and then, as there was no reason to restrain herself, broke into wailing sobs.
After some time, Krista stopped. She listened. The silence was deafening. This time there was no Ilsa coming to retrieve her, no Ilsa coming to admonish her for hiding, or for sleeping in the attic instead of in her own bed, no Ilsa coming to say, “Next time, young lady…”
Ilsa was dead. Her son was dead. Krista repeated those words to herself. No one is coming. Suddenly she was very sure. Neither Daddy nor Ilsa would walk back into her life. She had always half expected her father to walk back in, somehow, somewhere. She had been waiting forever. And Ilsa? She saw the bronze coffin lowered into the grave, smelled the fresh, upturned earth. She had been to the graveyard innumerable times. But wasn’t there a possibility? Couldn’t the past ever come back? Krista placed her hands on her abdomen. She had her answer.
They will never come back. They are gone. Dead. I have tried to keep them alive by holding onto the past, by denying life as it proceeded. And now I am doing the same thing with this tiny spirit I have had with me for the past four weeks. Am I going to hold onto that for years, the way I have with Ilsa and ever since Daddy disappeared?
“They can – they can come back,” she said out loud, defiantly.
She reached for the note she’d found earlier and tore it into pieces. “No!” she shouted into the yawning silence. There was no one to agree or disagree with her, just emptiness.
“Yes.”
Daddy and Ilsa are gone. My baby is gone. They are dead.
Krista threw herself against the jammed door and the silence in which she did not want to die. The Indian screen with the inlaid pattern of a many-armed dancing goddess fell away, toppling over a drafting board and dislodging a table lamp. Krista ran down the back steps to the cold kitchen. She opened the door and stood for a minute looking out the gate toward the garage, then at the back path, the meadow and the marsh.
Michael, where are you?
There was no sign of his car. No sign that anyone had been here. Had she merely dreamed that he had come to the house? No, she told herself. Michael had come. He had asked her to come out. He had come to see if she was all right. He was no dream, no illusion, but flesh and blood,
The small bell on the garden gate tinkled as she opened it and hurried down the long driveway, underneath the grapevine-covered arbor. She ran barefoot to the main road. There was no sign of him. She looked up and down the street, then turned back toward the house. Unexpectedly, she found it did not matter to her whether or not it had been a dream. The only thing that mattered to Krista in that moment was the sun. The light and heat spilling across the open marshes, the garden, the apple tree, and over her face, her arms, her legs… bringing her back to life.
Chapter Ten
The sound of a hammer rang out, echoing through the oak grove that formed the boundary between the Bourne property and the one next door. The neighbor’s house was being boarded for the off-season. Did that mean Deirdre or her mother might still be home supervising? Krista ran back into her grandmother’s house and slipped on her shoes. She took the back gate and the path along the fieldstone wall, through the small stand o
f trees, to her childhood friend’s back garden. A carpenter waved to her from his perch at the top of an aluminum ladder. His bare back glistened in the late-morning sun.
“They went to the beach,” he shouted down.
“Thank you. Thanks a lot.”
Krista turned back, again following the path back alongside the stone wall. She recalled the countless number of times over the years that Deirdre and she had stretched out the summer by going down to the water for just one more beach day. Each September, they prayed for more time, and then almost by magic or as if they had willed it to happen the late Indian summer would appear. They would be guaranteed another day or two of sunshine. Sometimes it would amount to a whole week of golden days. No one really wanted to go off- Island, if there was another beach day to be had. No one wanted to go home for the winter.
Krista stopped walking and looked up at her bedroom window. Paint peeled from the gables, the shutters and the rusted drainpipe. The open drapes and half-lifted shade might make the casual passer-by believe someone actually lived there. She then looked across the path to the grey, weathered wooden door of the stable. She wished that Priscilla, the last of the horses to live there, a black Morgan Daddy Bourne bought her when she was sixteen, was still there. Krista imagined the horse waiting for her. She wanted to ride at a canter down the beach trail and walk along the waterline.
After Ilsa’s death, the mare had been sent to Scrubby Neck Farm and Krista was not sure what had happened to her after that. She closed the green gate behind herself and took a long look at the garden, covered with fallen apples. Some had been on the ground for weeks, some a few days. She could gauge their age by their color: bright red, half green, yellow with decay. If Ilsa were still alive the grass would be cleared and trim and even as a carpet. My little golf course, she used to call it. The apples would have been raked up every day, before anyone else was awake to notice who it was that kept things so neat and orderly. Krista compared the lush ivy on the walls to the dry oak leaves, already falling to the ground.
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