Farthest House

by Margaret Lukas

  She shut his bedroom door and returned to the kitchen where she tipped the empty wine bottles on the table into her mouth. She brought others from the trash, let the drops of cheap alcohol drip on her tongue, and she licked the bottle rims, her hunger still ravishing.

  The kitchen cupboard held two cans of tomato soup and a can of green beans. She had no appetite, and it made no difference if she ate at all, except that she had a whole evening to fill while Papa slept and other high schoolers were out enjoying their first night of summer vacation. She opened a can of the soup, scooped it into a pan, and grimaced at the sight. Too red without milk. She added the beans. While she waited for the meal to heat, she lined the wine bottles across the table, something she started doing on the coldest winter nights when she studied alone and Papa slept—a row of the tall and thin-necked containers jutting across the table or in front of the sofa like witch’s teeth. She could talk to the shapes, even with their dejected color, and she liked the way the empty bottles caught the steady room light. They made a conduit to Papa. He’d reached with his thick fingers and palms and put his hand around them. Hands that long ago reached and wrapped strands of her loose hair behind her ear and took up her hand in crowded places—afraid of losing her.

  Only when she saw her own face in the bottles, a row of tiny and sickly Willows, did she push them over.

  She sat down with the bottles and her five books. The check-out limit was fifteen, but if she checked out a smaller number, she could return to the library more often. One of the books demonstrated painting techniques, two were pictorial history books of Native Americans, and the last two were Luessy’s mysteries. Willow opened the first of the history books, squinting at the bottom corners of the pictures for two letters: T.S., Thomas Starmore. My Thomas. Even in the absence of her great uncle’s initials, she looked for matches to photographs she remembered hanging on the den walls at Farthest House. Over time, a photographer’s initials were often lost, she knew, ignored in the multiple reproductions. Pictures became copies made from copies, reduced or enlarged with little concern for the notations. In the end, their source was credited only to the historical society that owned them, not the original photographer. If she found even one picture, either familiar or with the initials, she felt she could follow the print back through time, the way other families followed photos in scrapbooks, and she’d have legs carrying her to Farthest House.

  This was not so different from what I knew of Mary Wolfe, who at that moment was running up Willow’s street, her long hair and most of her face hidden beneath a silk hood. Mary still visited the first-grade classroom where Sister Dominic Agnes spent as many hours as possible, even evenings and weekends, sometimes sleeping on the hard floor. When Mary appeared at the classroom door, Sister Dominic Agnes lifted her eyes from her prayers and drew the young girl in. Together, they knelt on the two kneelers the nun had requisitioned and placed before the black chain still draping from the windows. The construction-paper, now with tiny rips, sagged with age, dust, scotch tape, and the weight of the hundreds of staples used to keep it together.

  A knock sounded on Willow’s door, and she sighed at the disruption but didn’t leave the table. She pretended she wasn’t home. The second knock was more insistent, and she knew she wasn’t fooling anyone. Papa’s car sat at the curb, and the house lights were on. Still, she hesitated, hoping whomever, selling whatever, or predicting some whenever end-of-time apocalypse would simply give up and go away. On the third knock, more a hammering, she thought of Papa sleeping and didn’t want him back in the kitchen with his need to “show ‘em.” She hurried to the door.

  Mary Wolfe stood with the screen already open. “Let me in before someone sees me.”

  Not wanting her to see the interior, Willow tried to step outside, but Mary pushed her way in. “You can’t tell anyone I came. Not even your dad.”

  The house, with its floors growing porous and rough and its sagging-seat sofa and row of wine bottles alert as disciples, dropped from Willow’s concerns. Mary had pushed back the hood of her silk jacket, and her long golden hair looked just-brushed. No matter how Willow wished it weren’t true, Mary was beautiful. Whether walking down a school hallway or sitting at lunch with a crowd around her, she was beautiful. Her blouses were always ironed and snow white, buttoned to the top with a tiny knot of white grosgrain ribbon at her throat. And while everyone else’s skirts looked snatched off the floor and stepped back into each morning, Mary’s had crisp, starched pleats. Even the denim jeans she wore now had pressed vertical creases straight as plumb lines. Beneath her silk jacket, she wore a blue satin blouse the same light blue color as her eyes. The cowl neck of her blouse reached nearly to her chin, and her painted nails, pink, not harsh red, stroked the lush fabric as if pointing to her own flawless face.

  On the sofa, Friar lifted his head and pulled back his ears. He stepped off and came to Willow with his tail hanging low. She heard the unrest in his throat, more harrumph than growl, and she reached down and placed her hand on his head.

  Mary eyed the large dog, then dismissed him, and returned her attention to Willow. “Promise you won’t tell. Promise! No one can know I came here.”

  “I promise.” If Mary didn’t want anyone to know, Willow would never breathe a word of it. She felt ashamed in her beat-up shorts and old T-shirt, and she watched Mary’s gaze pan the room. Sister Dominic Agnes once stood in that very spot and looked at a clean and kept-up house. Now, everything was just as the nun had hoped to find it then.

  The more Mary scrutinized the room, missing nothing but Willow, the more ashamed and out of place Willow felt. On the stove, the soup boiled and spat, and she went to turn off the burner, glad for an excuse to move and leave Mary, even if only for a moment.

  Mary followed her, “Show me your paintings.”

  Willow’s breath caught, and she slowly slid the pan off the heat. Her paintings? She hadn’t shown anyone her art since Mémé’s death. Being asked threatened old and unhealed wounds. “I don’t have any.”

  Mary started down the hall. “I can see them through your bedroom windows.”

  Fresh embarrassment rolled over Willow; she’d been caught lying. She followed Mary, keeping Friar at her side.

  “I want to see the one you’re doing right now,” Mary said, as they passed Julian’s door.

  Willow’s pace slowed. If Mary couldn’t be seen by anyone, not even Papa, and his car was slumped at the curb, then she knew he was down for the night and that not even knocking and conversation would wake him. Had she seen him stagger to his room? How many nights had she watched before she felt confident enough of his routine to knock?

  Most days, Willow didn’t notice the state of her room, but walking in with Mary made the room’s condition striking. The wallpaper, with its once bright and high-stepping ducks, was faded and peeling at the corners. Her floor was dull and rough, and the old lace curtains on the windows hung uneven and gray. The blanket she pulled off and then only tossed back onto the bed revealed sheets worn so thin the stripes of the mattress showed through. She wished Mother Moses were there, the corners of the old crocheting pooling onto the floor, and the butterflies and birds alive.

  Mary shut the door and turned around. “Pull the shades.”

  Friar had relaxed somewhat, but as the door shut, his ears turned keen again. Willow reached down a second time and put a steadying hand on his head. Did he know Mary? Had Mary been sneaking around outside the house and he picked up her scent, or had he seen her at a window? Maybe some evening, when he’d gone out to lift his leg and relieve himself on the sole tree in the backyard, she threw sticks at him.

  Pulling the shades as slow as she dared, Willow scanned the street for Mary’s friends, the jerk Derrick Crat or girls hiding in the shadows to see how far Mary would take the dare.

  Earlier paintings leaned against the walls, but Mary had no interest in the ones visible from the windows. She stood at the easel. “It’s creepy.” She stroked her throat again. �
��Why do you paint such weird stuff?”

  On the canvas, grays, greens, umbers, and sables dominated. A girl, half hidden in the shadows of overarching trees, crouched in undergrowth along a forest’s edge. She wore a mask: a wide square of bone-colored birch bark with two dark eyeholes.

  Willow smiled to herself and sat down on her bed. She never imagined Mary would one day be standing in her room, having all but broken in, to see a painting. “It’s not weird or creepy, she’s just hiding,” Willow said. “She’s scared to come out of the woods and into this world. It’s called White Mask.”

  Mary glowered, “Stupid.”

  “When she does come out, the mask will fall off. She’s been hiding her whole life because she knows if she takes a face everything will change.” Willow loved the story so far. She was doing exactly as Mémé had done in writing Mother Moses’ story. “If she takes a face, she can’t ever go back into hiding. That’s the scary part.”

  “Repeat. Stupid.”

  “I’ll bet Eve just wanted to have a face when she ate the apple, and then Adam, too. But he was scared to go first.” Keeping a straight face was hard, not because of Mary’s shocked look, but because the story poured forth as easily as if it were being read from a book. As easily as if White Mask herself were telling the story through Willow.

  “Can I have it when it’s done?”

  “No.” Willow would keep it and look at it and find more story. She wouldn’t pass her work out into a world that reached back and cursed her each time she did. “No,” she said again. “I have to keep it.”

  Mary folded her arms across her chest and unfolded them. “Well anyway, everyone already has a face. I was scared to come here, but I did. My parents would kill me if they found out.”

  “Why?” She wished she hadn’t asked. Given the differences in their appearance, they obviously originated on different planets. Of course Mary’s parents wouldn’t want her there. Still, Willow had always thought Mary didn’t like her because of her shoulder, or because she was a book nerd, or for a hundred other reasons. “Who cares what they think?”

  A slow smirk touched Mary’s lips. “At least they aren’t alcoholics.” She nodded, “Yeah, everyone at school knows.”

  Willow felt blown back years, and when Mary started to leave, she jumped up, catching her by the arm. She hadn’t wanted Mary in her house, but now with re-opened wounds and new embarrassments, she didn’t want to be alone. “I promised not to tell anyone you came.”

  “Show me your back.”

  Willow’s face blanched, and she imagined it turning as fixed as the white birch mask. “No,” she whispered.

  “Do it!”

  The world saw too much of her back through her clothes, but Mary stared at her, declaring with cold eyes that Willow’s only chance at friendship was through obedience. Willow glanced sidelong at the painting. Mary and her friends probably dressed in front of each other all the time, though this wasn’t about comparing cup sizes or the amount of lace on their bras. This was about rank, Mary wanting to see Willow at her most vulnerable.

  “Chicken!”

  Slowly, inch by inch—giving Mary plenty of time to change her mind—Willow turned around and began lifting her shirt.

  15

  At Willow’s age, I often stood looking out over lavender fields, wave after wave of purplish-blue color. I envied the women and young girls doing the harvesting. They worked hunched over the rows with short sickle-shaped knives, their faces immersed in all that perfume and color, the bags slung across their shoulders swelling with the cuttings. The Beast’s chambers were also rich with color: his bedding, tapestries, paintings, even his vestments—elaborate robes, and like all ceremonial robes, designed to mask an ordinary man—reds, greens, blues and lavender. Did his owning all that color, even to his emerald ring, help convince us that God favored him? How else could he have so much?

  In my teenage years, I might have been emotionally stronger, but like a bird caged from a hatchling, I had no knowledge of freedom. I’d grown no flight feathers and had no vision of sky. Then one day, word arrived that a photographer from America was some twenty miles away showing his work, photographs of Native Americans. So rare was any sort of cultural event in our region, especially with so many fleeing the border with Prussia, The Beast immediately sent a rider to ask him to come. A week later, Thomas Starmore stepped through the door. Over dinner that evening, when I dared, I peeked at him. I was accustomed to withdrawing and remaining as unseen as possible, and I was happy to let Sabine hold center stage. She was joyful always, and why not?

  I raised my eyes from my stewed rabbit just as Thomas looked across the table at me. I realized we were sharing an exact thought: The Beast was far hungrier for someone to impress with his adventures in America than he was to hear about Thomas’s work. The thought itself wasn’t of any great significance, but the synchronicity of Thomas’s mind with mine was. It was flight, if only a moment long. I had experienced something entirely new and made a connection with someone outside of my circumscribed life.

  Later, he displayed his photographs across the cleared table. Walking slowly around, I stopped at a picture of a woman who was the photograph’s sole subject. No child in the picture labeled her as a mother. No man labeled her as a wife. Not even a basket labeled her as a craftswoman. I stared at the picture, and my feelings can best be described as music in my head. Here was a woman whole unto herself, not beautiful, not wealthy, but complete. I thought of Mme. Francoise. Knowing that such women were also in America brought tears to my eyes, and I longed to go and experience the new world.

  That’s when I noticed the hand and the woman’s soiled lap. Blood.

  Sabine came to stand beside me, and she also saw the hand, its two fingers cleaved at the first knuckle. “What happened?” her voice clear and self-confident, calling to Thomas across the room. He came and stood at my shoulder, closer to me than Sabine. Was it because of my tears?

  “I only know she cut herself,” he said. “I believe she was mourning. It’s rumored to be a custom at the loss of a husband or child, but it’s got to be rare, because she’s the first I’ve seen.”

  “She must have been really sad,” Sabine said.

  Thomas nodded, “I can’t imagine inflicting that much pain on yourself.”

  I looked up at him, my shyness replaced by disbelief. Here was a man who thought a woman’s suffering important enough to record.

  Years later, when Tory was Sabine’s age, I should have been watching out for her. I was her surrogate mother, allowing Luessy, who carried the expense of Farthest House and the feeding and clothing for the four of us, to spend long hours writing. I failed Tory by averting my eyes—however subconsciously I did so. Too afraid of seeing, of revisiting the groundswell of pain I’d experience in my life before Thomas, I also failed Luessy, Julian, Jonah, and myself. I acted no different from my mother, who used her religious “duties” as a thick veil pulled righteously over her eyes.

  The day came when an undeniable darkness burst over everything. When that day came for my mother, she crawled into bed and refused food. When it came for me, I fought.

  Now, I restated the vow I made at Willow’s birth: I would not leave her. And the vow I made to myself: I would keep my eyes open and feel what I needed to feel.

  In the front rooms, she kept the shades drawn. She forbid Mary the newspapers, the wine bottles rising and dancing like clattering bones. And Papa.

  Julian didn’t object to living in a space of shadow and dusk. His mounting hoards filled him with a subterranean panic, and the less he saw of what he was doing, even as he added new weight, the better. Nothing mattered to him but Willow. She was everything, the reason he had to get himself back. He would, too. Tomorrow. Tomorrow, somehow, he would find his way back. Until then, Willow was taken care of financially. His mother had seen to that. Not him, not her father.

  Only to Willow’s room did Mary have access, entering and leaving through the side window where
Willow kicked out the bottom of the screen so that the wire mesh lifted and lowered like a slow trap door. Mary might have one creamy leg draped over the bedroom windowsill before Willow realized she’d been favored again. Sometimes, too, Willow kept her windows locked and the vinyl shades with their frayed strings pulled down. Hardest were the weeks and even months that passed without Mary visiting. During the long absences, Willow forgave Mary for not coming, and at school, she kept her promise and never acknowledged Mary. She told herself that plenty of girls would envy even the meager time and attention Mary did give her. Mary Scraps, she called them, recognizing in herself a hunger too big to refuse even the bits thrown her way.

  In December of their junior year, the night of the school’s Christmas Prom, which Willow wasn’t attending, never having attended any school dance, snow fell and wind gusts struck the house in undulating waves, reminding her of the night Mémé died. She worked at copying a plant from one of my watercolor journals: datura with its long and jagged leaves and showy white flowers.

  Just as she prepared to quit for the night and wash up my old brushes, Friar rose and hurried to the window. Willow caught the last of a vanishing motion. The window light extended only an inch beyond the pane, but just enough to reveal a narrow ribbon of color at the window’s edge. Lemon yellow, the color of Mary’s favorite coat because it matched the same bright color of the sports car she received on her sixteenth birthday. Every time Mary walked about in her yellow, the TR6 was heralded, though it sat in a parking lot out of sight.

  Wiping her hands down the thighs of her jeans, Willow glanced at the clock: 12:34. Mary must have insisted Derrick Crat, still her steady, take her home immediately after the dance. She must have hurried out of her dress and into sturdier clothes for the nearly eight-block walk over. Mary never drove there, never parked her identifiable car at the curb. But to walk this late? In a snow storm?