“Here’s what I wanted to show you: this house.” The photograph she held out to me was very old indeed, and featured a family, a group of about ten people in front of a large white edifice, all posed stiffly, some standing and some sitting on straight chairs, in the manner of the earliest portraits, for which the slightest gesture or error of informality would ruin an afternoon’s effort. The house looked familiar. It was square, and the dark, possibly black trim around its windows gave it a distinctly unwelcoming air, seeming to suggest that a potential visitor might be better off out of doors, where the rigors of mortality held less sway.
Their starched black dresses and suits—they were all in mourning—and careful hairdressings looked to be of an era a century before. Their faces had been scratched out, and this struck me as both unfortunate and appropriate. Whatever gathering or event this group portrait was meant to memorialize might have been better left unrecorded.
“Do you see?” Raquel said excitedly, though she kept her voice low. “These are the descendants of the Goodes who came here after the trials in Salem. Here they stayed, and this is the house they lived in. And this is a picture of them the day after their youngest daughter—she was only eighteen, I believe, at the time of her death—was executed for a crime she didn’t commit, or at least not intentionally. The family legend has it that she and another girl were out swimming in the Shift River and Emily Goode was fooling around, showing her friend how her ancestors had been ‘tested’ for the presence of witchcraft, and she was holding her under the water just for a minute, but then the girl struggled, and her head hit a rock, and the girl died. No one was sure whether she died of the blow to her head or of water in her lungs. But Emily Goode was convicted of her murder and was hung. Even though she was well along in her pregnancy. And the family never forgave the town for this unyielding punishment, and always wore black, and did not consort with the townspeople, and kept to themselves. This is Jacob Goode, her brother.” She pointed out a tall, slender, faceless man with a round hat like a Quaker’s. “The two were thick as thieves. Separated only in death, and some say not even then. He was in training to be a minister, but on her execution day he renounced his faith. He never entered a church again.
“But although the Goode family removed itself from the goings-on of the town, they did not remove themselves from the town itself, as they had done before when faced with an injustice of this magnitude. They would not be forced out again from the place they had called home for nearly two centuries. And even much later, a hundred years later, when the towns were to be flooded to make the reservoir, the few remaining members of the family refused to evacuate their property. The officials, of course, tried to move them, but they were immovable; they just stayed where they were, even as the waters rose, and they were drowned in their home. In this house you see here. I suppose it was a final injustice, and they were ready for it.” I looked again at the photograph and seemed to see the resolve imminent in their postures, their upright bearing, the poise of their hands. They were ready at that moment to die.
“But enough of these dusty relics! Let’s go down to the water and I’ll show you proof.” Raquel’s eyes were shining with certainty and engagement and I thought, Ah, so this is it. This is what she came here for. Proof. And I am to be her witness; her accomplice, too. We tiptoed past the room where Theo slept, down the stairs, out the door, and down the driveway to Raquel’s car. Before I knew it we were headed toward the loop road, and around it in the deep of evening to an access road I had never noticed before, one about a quarter of the way around the circumference of the reservoir, clockwise, from Wick. This was where the town called Hammerstead lay, deep under the water. The remaining two lost towns of Shadleigh and Morrow—just to form their names with the mouth of my mind made me shiver. Did they still answer to those silent names, now that their borders were erased, their topographies washed away, their skies filled with black water? To say the names brought back all the inhabitants, the lives, and planted them there again, lost lives with eyes peering up, hopelessly, from the bottom of the darkest day anyone should ever see.
“COME OUT HERE, it’s not cold. It’s like bathwater, actually.” Raquel stood knee-deep, her shorts rolled up high around her thighs. I did not remember getting out of the car or trekking down the little path to the water’s edge, but here we were, and there she was. It must have been about ten o’clock already. The sky had turned a violent blue, and the trees around the circumference of the water wore the black outlines that would soon spread and merge to make pitch blackness. “You have to come out here to see.”
I made my way slowly in. It was indeed warm, unreasonably so. I had never felt it like this before—it was almost hot. It made me want to feel it all over me, unmediated, and so I waded back to the shore and stripped down, leaving my T-shirt and shorts in a pile, and then into the water, out to where Raquel stood, arms crossed under her breasts, regarding me. “That’s good, Ginger. It will be much easier to see when you are naked.” I didn’t question her logic; I knew only that the dark water against my skin felt like a giant mother’s hand. And Raquel’s hand was on my shoulder; we were chest-deep in the water now, and so she didn’t have far to go to place her other hand heavily on my other shoulder, a grip, more than a placement, and use the full weight of her body, buoyant in the water, to land on me, behind me, and push me under, and hold me there.
WHAT DID I SEE, there, under the water.
I AWOKE, UNBREATHING, in the midst of an unsuccessful gasp, with my face pressed up against the little book with the gilt-edged pages. My throat was closed, my mouth was dry, my eyes were sandy. I sat up and filled my lungs, rubbed my hands over my eyes. In the Motherwells’ bathroom I splashed my face and dried it on a red towel. A faint tracing of Raquel’s fresh entry was printed on my damp temple. The lock had made an impression on my cheek. I moved quietly out into the hallway, then slipped past the room where they still slept, or were silent, down the stairs, and out the door. I went to go find Cherry.
16.
At the Endicotts’ we woke hot and dehydrated into a newly sunny morning, and decided to make a day of it. We landed at the mill with a blanket and some cans of soda and packaged snacks grabbed from the cupboard. I don’t know how the hours passed exactly, but before we knew it the mosquitoes were out in full force, the sun was getting low. It was time to seek shelter.
Although I had felt a great deal of relief at being in Cherry’s aggressively familiar company, it just seemed right—or at least it did to me, and I had the force to carry us both—that we should drop in at the Motherwells’, and, once there, that we should stay for dinner. Cherry didn’t protest. I was quite hungry, a little weary, and sun-dazed, and from the look of her, her glazed eyelids, her plush cheeks, Cherry shared my somnambulance. We wore our minimalist summer uniforms: T-shirts, cutoffs, sneakers. I didn’t even have underwear on. I don’t know about Cherry.
Dinner was in the making, and while Theo stood, cooking, we three sat around the kitchen table, drinking something Raquel called “sangria” but which tasted like a lemony fruit punch, in the path of the cross-draft created by the screen door and the open window. Cicadas made noise in the bushes; pretty soon moths and beetles would beat against the screens. We got to talking about dreams: Cherry offered up, shyly, some small comment about her own recent night terrors.
“What?” Raquel pounced. “You mean the kind that wake you up, shivering and sweating? Do they go away once you’re awake? Or are you still afraid, even after? I think the most interesting part is after you wake up, seeing how long it takes for that fear to recede. I once dreamed I had no face, or rather that my face was plastic, was constantly shape-shifting, cycling in no particular order through all the stages of my life, from infancy through great age. All the next day I felt unsure of my own aspect, and didn’t know how to move my lips or even blink my eyes.”
I could see that Cherry was uncomfortable with Raquel’s attention. She made no reply, and even leaned back in h
er chair, as though to remove herself. She fanned herself with a drooping hand, and took a gulp of her drink.
“Rough night for a young mind,” Raquel finally said, laughing a little. Always compelled to break tension, narrative or otherwise.
“Very interesting.” Theo turned to us from the counter and spoke with an air of finitude, as though it was to be the last word on the subject, but then, just as quickly, he resumed speaking. “It puts me in mind of that Zen koan; the one about faces. Of course the thing about a koan is that it brooks no explanation; you must say no more after you say a koan.”
“Well, then, everything is a koan, in that case. Come on, spill it.” Raquel’s hair was piled up on top of her head and the green shirt she wore increased her resemblance to some lizard, basking in the black sun on a black rock.
“I’m sure you’ve heard this one before . . .”
“No introductions, please!”
Theo smiled, came over, and placed his hands, palms up, on the table, as though holding a book open.
“What, then, is the face you wore before you were born?” His voice lilted, as though he really expected an answer.
Raquel leaned back from the table, eyes closed like someone who has just swallowed the sacrament. “You know,” she said, “in every pile of horseshit there is a teaspoonful of truth. Why, just the other day Ginger said to me”—and here she turned to Theo and waved her hand in my direction—“that I look like I mean everything I say, just like other people do. That my facial expressions are remarkably open. That in fact I’m as legible as an open book!”
I was a little taken aback by this interpretation. What I had said (although, on second thought, I could not remember having actually spoken it to her, but just thinking it) was that it seemed to me like she said everything she thought, but that she thought only of what to say. It also seemed to me—though I would never have said this out loud—that she was as proud as a queen of her malaise, and that her disaffection found an equal only in her corresponding desire to be “read like a book.” It occurred to me as an ultimate irony of Raquel’s situation if she were, in fact, a telepath.
“Cherry.” Raquel addressed my friend like a preschool teacher would a problem tot. “Why won’t you tell us what is in your dreams? It’s the most interesting thing there is to tell.” Cherry smiled a little, weakly, I thought; said, “I’m too hungry.” Indeed, I was famished. Theo took down a stack of plates from the cupboard. I stood up to help him set the table, but Raquel motioned me to sit down again. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “He loves to do that sort of thing. Makes him feel humble and centered. Listen,” she said, as I sat down. “If Cherry won’t tell hers, as host I feel as though I should offer one of mine. But the sad truth is that I never remember my dreams. They’re as mysterious to me as they are to you. You can’t imagine my dreams, can you? The next best thing, then, is for me to tell you your dream.” Cherry shifted a little in her chair, rested her cheek in her hand. I wondered if she had the same achy headache that had embraced my skull. Too much sun, not enough of anything else. I wondered, too, if she had noticed that, in fact, Raquel had told us one of her own dreams not ten minutes before. Or had I heard her wrong. Maybe it was a daydream.
“LET ME SEE, how to begin. You arrive at a house, an old country house, maybe it’s on a farm. It’s on a slight hill; the fields all around it are incredibly green, an unnatural, sort of acid green. The sky seems to be the only boundary. In all directions the horizon line is just sky meeting field. There is a dry rutted lane, with dusty grass growing up in the middle where wheels never go.
“You have arrived at this house, in the hot midday sunshine, to see your best friend. He is a tall man, all dressed in black like a brother in a religious sect. The Shakers, or the Mennonites. His beard is long and brown, untrimmed, and his eyes are the brown of muddy topsoil.”
But this was my dream. I’m sure it was my dream. Could it be Cherry’s dream, too? I didn’t dare look across the table to gauge her reaction. I wanted this dream to be mine, and if I could just hold on to it, tightly, through Raquel’s relentless narration . . .
“You are inside the house. There is a big butcher’s block in the kitchen. You converse over it, facing each other. He has been accused of a horrible crime—an ax murder. Suddenly, you are afraid. There is something in his eyes now, something in the dark, clouded depths of his familiar eyes that is telling you to run! Run for your life! You trust what you see. He is your best friend, after all, and would not betray you.
“Out you go, out the door and across the little road, straight into the field and across it and over more hills and straight on until you come to an obstacle: your stopping point. A fence that you can’t climb, tall, made of wood but with an electrified wire running all along the top. You stand, looking up at the top and past it, at the green fields that stretch beyond, past even where the eye fails.
“There is a presence at your elbow. You turn and catch the eyes of your friend, grinning into your own eyes. He does not even appear to be winded, it is as though he has materialized there next to you. His expression shifts from second to second; his features are kaleidoscopic, they make moues and grimaces, winks and blinks and tics and tears and beaming smiles. ‘My friend,’ he says, and the fear that is inside you begins to bloom, like a stomach cramp, like the bends of a deep-sea diver.
“‘Now you must know the truth,’ he intones. You are riveted to the spot. It is clear that he has caught you. You are the culprit. Positions have shifted. That which you came to address, you must now assume responsibility for.
“‘Your best friend is your worst enemy.’ As he utters these words, all the masks drop away and his one true face is revealed: if he is not the Devil himself, he is certainly at least a powerful demon. . . .”
I’m certain she would have gone on, if Cherry had not slumped forward in her chair, her head hitting the table with a surprisingly hollow crack.
I was up out of my seat before Theo could even say “Oh, shit,” from where he stood at the stove. I pulled Cherry up by the shoulders and saw instantly from her rolling eyes and slack mouth that she was having an insulin reaction. I ran to the refrigerator and found apple cider and some marmalade. Raquel asked, “Shall we call anyone?” in a very steady voice. I shook my head, began spooning preserves into Cherry’s open mouth. She tasted it on her tongue and then devoured the spoonful. I fed her the entire jar, and by the time it was gone, she was upright and herself again. She washed it all down with a glass of cider.
“That was stupid of me,” she said. “To go for so long without eating. I’m diabetic,” she explained, apologetic, to Raquel.
“I’ll just bet you are,” Raquel responded, enigmatically.
“Wow.” Theo stepped forward, seeming to insert himself between where Raquel and Cherry sat at the table. He put his arm around Cherry’s shoulders. “Are you going to be all right?”
“Oh yes,” she said, thickly. “I’m just going to the bathroom.” She got up and went out the door and down the hall, where she had left the black fanny pack in which she kept her insulin kit. I heard the bathroom door shut.
“Raquel,” Theo said, “I think we should put Cherry to bed.”
“Oh, she’ll be fine, I’m sure this happens all the time. Ginger can walk her home. The walk will do both of them good. Besides, we haven’t had dinner yet. Once she has some of your delicious concoction in her belly . . . she’ll be better than ever.”
Raquel’s tone was eminently reasonable.
BUT THAT IS NOT what happened. We did eat huge plates of some kind of vegetable stew, with zucchini and eggplant and tomato, over pillows of rice. But then somehow, moving as though carried out to sea by a strong current, I left Cherry there, limp on the couch in the living room. She looked blankly at me—or she looked imploringly at me and I looked blankly back; the distinction is a fine one but it makes the difference of a lifetime—and said, “Wait, where are you going?” Theo came downstairs with a blanket and p
illow, which he laid at her feet. Raquel said, “Theo, really?” from the top of the stairs, and then receded, dematerializing, ascending into the silence that followed. I told Cherry I would see her tomorrow, and as I closed the door behind me I thought I saw him reach out a hand to touch her hair. I caught just the beginning of the gesture, and felt a sharp, confused stab of misery and exultation. Sometimes it hurts, growing up: that’s what my mother said to me one day when she found me weeping, consolably, over the final volume in the Anne of Green Gables series, in which Anne has grown so far away from the delightful child she was. The loss of that child could be temporarily ameliorated by beginning at the beginning of the first book again. But this stab felt more like the thrust I felt at the sight of penetration, only higher, somewhere in my chest. My heart contracted, and did not expand again.
I had been waiting patiently for him to touch me again, ever since the Fourth of July. This waiting had added a secret centrality to every day, every evening, every interaction in which the possibility hung lightly, or sometimes with the weight of a thousand breaths, a thousand glances I shot at him. It kept me on the inside of his mind, inside that dark shell, in which he and I were equal in every measure and there was no difference in age, in capacity, in authority. I dwelt in there with him and tried to read his every motion, make with him his every decision—every time he chose to pass behind my chair or reach over me for a book or a knife or a pillow.
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