The House Girl

by Tara Conklin

  “I don’t believe you,” Lina said, though she did, of course she did. Oscar shook his head and lowered himself to sit beside her on the bed. He placed an arm around her shoulders in a hug of sorts but Lina did not turn toward him. She pulled her knees up near her chin, wrapped her arms around her legs, drawing herself into a tighter and tighter self-contained unit, something she remembered having done as a child, trying to reduce herself. To see if she could make herself disappear.

  I cannot bear to leave her. I cannot bear to stay, Grace had written all those years ago.

  Oscar continued, less afraid, it seemed, now that the secret itself was out, the most important words spoken. “Three years ago, she sent me a letter, just a few lines, just to let me know she was okay. That’s what she wrote, ‘I’m okay.’ You were in law school, you were in class when I got the mail, and it just seemed so … unreal. It seemed amazing, and horrible. She said that she would contact you. I waited for her, every day I thought I’d hear a knock and it would be her. And I couldn’t write back, she didn’t give an address. I couldn’t ask her what was going on. After that letter, I thought about her all the time. I started remembering her, before she left, before you were born, when she was young, and thinking about why she left, what I had done, what had happened between us. So I made the Grace pictures. Those were my answer to her. And to you, Carolina. That’s why I made them.”

  Enough. The woman drowning in a blank expanse of blue. The woman trapped within a frame. Lina shook her head and began abruptly to cry, silently but with a great volume of tears. She swiped at her eyes, scratching herself, and the pain sparked in her a brief, futile anger directed not only at her father, but at Marie Calhoun, who had betrayed her mother, and Porter Scales, who had loved her, and the books her mother had read, the pictures her mother had made; and anger at Grace herself, for leaving. And Lina realized why she and Oscar had stayed, all these years, just the two of them, in a house Oscar couldn’t afford, a house that was too big: he had been waiting for Grace to come back. He had been waiting.

  Lina released her legs and stood up, looking down at her father. “All this time—you lied to me. Why did you lie?” Her voice was wobbly and rough from the tears and she saw him wince as she spoke.

  “Grace didn’t want you to grow up thinking that she had abandoned you,” Oscar said, speaking quickly. “She asked me to tell you, to tell everyone, that she had died. She thought it would be better for you. I thought it would be better. And it was all I could do for her. She made it clear that she wanted nothing else from me.” Oscar stopped speaking then and his face was pained, desperate for Lina to accept that he had had no other choice. “Carolina, I am so sorry.”

  He said these words in a voice Lina had never heard before, and their effect was sudden and profound. She felt her anger spin away, but in its place was a new crushing confusion. Lina recalled those sketches she’d seen of herself as a baby. Daughter. Daughter. Daughter. Daughter, Grace had written.

  “But why did she disappear? People get divorced, they split up. Why did she have to leave me?” Lina’s mind clenched tight around this question and would not release.

  Oscar looked at his hands. “I don’t know, Carolina. She wanted … something else. To make art, to live alone. I don’t know.”

  This answer left Lina hollow, but instinctively she knew it was all Oscar could tell her. How many times must he have asked himself these same questions? Those interminable months after Grace left, and it wasn’t purely grief that had kept him inside and alone, it had been guilt as well. Grace had left them both behind: Lina, a motherless child; Oscar, forced to sustain this lie. Lina turned away from Oscar and dropped where she stood, kneeling on the hard floor. All at once she stopped crying and wiped her eyes on the back of her hands.

  Oscar spoke carefully then, as though he had been preparing these words and wanted to say them well. “I want you to know that being your father is the best thing that ever happened to me. The most inspiring, the most creative. I’ve been so angry at Grace for leaving us, and angry at myself for not being able to help her. But really, too, I’m grateful to her. Because I got the chance to be your father in a way I wouldn’t have if she’d stayed. She’s missed so much, Carolina, and I’ve been so lucky.”

  Lina’s throat ached with Oscar’s words, but she did not cry again. She felt his presence behind her, anxious, exhausted by all of this, waiting for her to do something, to yell or weep or embrace him, but she stayed where she was on the floor of her room. Silently the minutes marched forward and Lina’s feet began to prickle, her knees to ache, and she stood and walked to the window. She stared at the branches of the linden tree she had climbed as a child, at the blank window across the street where her third-grade best friend had lived, at the metal fire escape where once she had seen a small monkey, calm and watchful, chewing an orange. As the shadows lengthened and the air cooled into evening, a calm descended on the room and on Lina. Oscar remained on the bed. She felt empty and clean, like a stretch of damp new sand left by a retreating sea.

  “Do you know where she is now?” Lina asked at last, and her voice was small but steady.

  “No. No, I don’t.”

  “Has she contacted you again?”

  Oscar hesitated. “Yes,” he said with purpose, as though he had anticipated the question and only now had decided how to answer.

  Lina turned sharply from the window.

  “When? What did she say?”

  “After Porter’s review was in the paper. Grace read it, and she called me. She wants to talk to you, she said. She left a number. When you’re ready.” Oscar pulled from his back pocket a scrap of paper with a scribbled string of digits. He came to stand beside Lina at the window.

  As Lina took the paper, she looked directly at her father. Everyone always said she looked like her mother, but Oscar’s eyes were her eyes, she realized now: different in color, but identical in shape and the way they fractured the light, the way they inadvertently showed emotion, Lina and Oscar both powerless to hide behind them. His showed relief and regret and love.

  “Call her when you’re ready.” Oscar hugged her then, and Lina did not relax fully into his embrace but still she allowed herself to fall against him, to rest her head on his shoulder and smell the Brooklyn air and turpentine and oil and cigarette smoke, the closed-in house dust, and, yes, the sweet perfume from Natalie, all the elements that composed his scent.

  Oscar released her from the hug, squeezed her hand, hugged her again, as though worried that the disparate pieces that fit together as Lina were now at risk of clattering broken to the floor.

  “I’m okay, Dad. We’re okay.” She said these words and knew they were true. It would be easy to blame Oscar for where she was now, alone and unsure about so many things, but it wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t even her mother’s fault. Lina could not blame a stranger. Her life was her own, and a life could be a good one, or it could be one of an empty wishing for more, for something different.

  Oscar hugged her one last time and then silently left the room. Lina remained standing at her bedroom window. She watched the streetlights flicker on, the building go dark and then illuminate again in patches as people moved into rooms, their bodies quick and colorful; she heard the front door slam as Oscar went out and she watched him walk east along Sixth Street, his head down, hands in pockets, then turn the corner toward the subway and disappear.

  Finally Lina turned away from the window. She looked toward the door, then to her bag, her BlackBerry. Should she call her mother now? Was she ready? There was a sudden restless energy in her, and the idea of going for a run—just gliding through the park, around the loop again and again and again—seemed delicious, but it was too dark, and physical exhaustion would not erase this peculiar discomfort, this staggering new reality.

  Looking back at the bed, Lina’s eyes fell to Caleb’s letter and her pulse settled, her energy found a place of focus. She needed to finish the letter, and her urgency derived as much from
her desire to see the story’s end as to escape, just briefly, from all that would undoubtedly follow tomorrow, next week, next month. Grace did not die. Grace did not die. Every time she repeated her father’s words, she felt a small, terrible, glorious shock. But now, at this moment alone in her darkening childhood bedroom, Lina fixed her thoughts on Dorothea and on Josephine.

  Save them, Jack had said. Dorothea was alive, but weakened from loss of blood. The baby, I could not rightly say. I recalled a lecture at the medical college, given not by Dr. Coggins but a colleague of his, a specialist in obstetrics, about the surgical procedure of opening up the woman’s abdominal cavity so that the fetus might be removed, sometimes with the effect of saving mother and child, sometimes of saving one, and other times with loss of both. It was possible. I had the tools to operate; my sharp knives waited within my bag, and Jack could fetch what else I needed. But life was ebbing away from Dorothea, I could see the blood seeped deep into the mattress on which she lay, her face pale under the light of the gas lamp glowing on the bedside table. Save them. I knew that I must act quickly. And so I did.

  You must know already the end of this sorry episode. I do not want to fix in your mind the images that will remain forever in mine so I will end here with no further particulars.

  Dorothea did not survive, her blood loss was too great, nor the baby boy that we pulled from her, purple and still. Jack held the infant to him with one arm as he sat beside Dorothea on the bed, clutching her still-warm hand in his. As I watched him, I felt a coldness in my limbs as though I stood at the center of a frigid storm, myself alone at its dead calm center. I could not move, I could only bear mute witness to the enormity of Jack’s grief. By and by I went to the bed and sat with him. I do not recall if any words were spoken or embraces exchanged, only that we sat together, mourning, and that was the last Jack and I have ever been so long and so peaceful in each other’s company.

  After a time, we heard the sound of horses arriving. The dawn had now broken, and a pale pink light streaked across the floor of the room where the two of us huddled by the bed and the lamp as though it were still night. I looked outside and saw Langston dismount and Dr. Coggins rushing towards the house with his black doctor’s bag, the mirror image of mine. I heard his heavy steps on the stairs. I stood before the door as he entered the room.

  What has happened here? Dr. Coggins asked me, his eyes casting quickly over the scene of Jack and Dorothea and the little one. Jack remained perched on the bedside and did not acknowledge the new arrivals.

  I began to recount the night’s events but Dr. Coggins held up a hand to stop my narrative and stepped closer to me, putting his face directly in front of mine, so close that I could count the stubbed gray whiskers on his chin.

  Have you been drinking? he said. I smell it on you, on your breath.

  Langston stood some distance behind Dr. Coggins, his head turning from the trio on the bed to me as Dr. Coggins uttered his accusation. It was the set of Langston’s jaw, solid and sure, and the slight nodding of his head that told me he had informed the doctor of my state when he had come to collect me from Mrs. Bursy’s.

  I did not reply to Dr. Coggins. There was nothing I could say. Cold were my fingers, my feet numb, the distance between myself and these others—their cheeks warm and red from riding, so sure in themselves and their rightness—stretched boundless before me. Dr. Coggins walked to the bed, to the ruined body of Dorothea, gazing all the while at the blood, the blood everywhere in the room that in the darkness had not seemed so blackish red as it did now in the dawn light.

  You are a disgrace, he said. At the words, Jack lifted his head away from his sorrow, staring at me, the horror reflected in his eyes. Nothing that I do, no wounds I suture or fevers I chill, will ever erase that image from my mind.

  Still I said nothing. I backed away from Dr. Coggins, from Jack’s gaze and Langston, still nodding, and left the room. What was I to say? I have returned again and again to that night, to the knock on Mrs. Bursy’s door, the curve of the baby’s spine under Dorothea’s tight skin, the movement of her eyes, the first cut of the scalpel as I began the procedure, each step that led to Dr. Coggins’s accusation, my departure.

  Please save them, Jack had said. In the years since that night I have asked myself, what should I have done differently? Would a better man, a more sober man, a more sober doctor, have chosen a different course?

  The answer I have come to again and again is no.

  After the death of Dorothea and the little one, named Michael Abel before his burial, I left Randolph Township and the company of Dr. Coggins and all others I knew there. I made no efforts to clear my name or salvage my professional reputation; they would have been in vain, I am certain, and I lacked the wherewithal to try. A great despondency descended upon me.

  I traveled south. In Jackson, I renewed my acquaintance with the bottle and sought out temporary work where no one would care what my past held so long as I could mix powders and poultices, stitch a wound, bleed a fever, pull a tooth. I worked there for a spell, and then moved on, and then again I moved. I became a sort of wandering country doctor, roaming from one town to the next, finding cheap lodging, seeking out my patients wherever I might find them. In the main I treated poor farmers, whites and free blacks, rural folk who lived far from towns or any manner of apothecary. Burns, broken limbs, chilblains, cuts. Cholera, malaria, smallpox, typhus, other maladies the likes of which I had never seen nor knew the first bit of how to cure.

  In the spring of the year 1851, my wanderings brought me again to the state of Virginia. I wish now that I could say that some noble purpose prompted my return. A desire, perhaps, to attempt reconciliation with Jack, to atone in some way for the death of Dorothea. In fact no such thoughts entered my mind. I traveled without purpose or design, from one accommodating tavern to the next, from one paying patient to another, and in this way I came again to Virginia. My faith in the things I had once held true and dear, the medical sciences, and indeed the Lord above, had all but left me. There was no place for me, I believed, no profession, no family, no home.

  And that is when Mr. Rust found me, lying on the ground one cold and damp morning outside a tavern that I had begun to frequent. He knew I was a doctor. He had noticed me ministering to the sickly and infirm of the surrounding area, so he said, and wanted to offer me a professional position at a decent wage. I listened to him, not there that morning but later the next day when we met as planned at the same tavern. He bought a bottle and poured me the first glass, the liquid fracturing the light from the late-afternoon sun that filtered through the tavern’s open door, looking to my eyes like the light that had burned out the open windows of Jack’s house that night. I drank it back and held out my glass for another.

  My assignment was simple. Fugitives, both real and supposed, were delivered regularly to Mr. Rust. Generally, he conducted his own medical examinations on the offered goods but was never certain what he might be looking at. He often suffered losses on account of deaths, or damage so severe the fugitives weren’t fit for any useful purpose. I was to be an improvement upon his methods—an insurance policy, of sorts. I would examine each fugitive before a sale was concluded and say yea or nay to each, so that Mr. Rust could be certain that what he was buying, even if it looked broken beyond repair, could be mended and sold on. But the mending I did would be of the most minimal sort. My instructions were to disguise, to treat ills only as far as they would impede a sale, with remedy appearing only as an occasional and incidental result. This is the scheme to which I agreed. That day in the tavern, I drank with the slavecatcher Mr. Rust, and I shook his hand.

  Why did I make company with a man like Benjamin Rust? It is a question I know you are bound to ask and I have no simple answer. I have never been a political man. I reckon the workings of government and the law are best left to philosophical, intellectual, considered men, among whose number I have never counted myself. That is why his offer did not strike me as either right or wrong in
its particulars; it simply was, just as the institution of slavery, that I have lived my whole life in close approximation to, simply is. Fugitive slaves in the possession of men like Mr. Rust are likely to be needing medical attention of one sort or another, and I reckoned that I was as good or bad a candidate to supply it as any other.

  Even this is no explanation, I realize. Mine was a choice made of the basest kind of weakness. It was not even so much a choice as a simple surrender. My funds were all but exhausted, my health was poor, a cough racked my chest at night, and my clothes hung as though I were a strawman intended to frighten away the birds. My life was devoid of any purpose or meaning, any person to watch over me or give me care, any person for whom I felt the barest stirring of emotion. In this state of near death—and it was a sort of death, I know that now—I had existed those long months since Dorothea’s passing. Every day I drew breath, I drank my whiskey, my heart pumped nothing more than blood. I was empty of all but the barest markings of a man—legs to walk, a mouth to drink, a head to nod as Mr. Rust instructed me to meet him the next day at the abandoned barn. I shook his hand. Yes, I said. Yes.

  The next day I arrived at the assigned place, at the hour instructed, and the first delivery came, shackled behind a gray mule led by a patroller whom Mr. Rust greeted by name. Hiram, he said. How fine to see you. Many of the patrollers who sold to Mr. Rust were lawfully required to return any fugitives back to their rightful owners, but Rust paid sums far greater than the rewards offered for return. And so they came instead to him, in secret, many of them shamefully. The patrollers had some base code amongst them, despite the nature of their work, but for most avarice was a more powerful urge and it was this instinct to which Mr. Rust appealed.

  I remember well that first morning. I remember the mule’s braying loud and hoarse as a foghorn throughout the hours as I examined the fugitives on offer. I remember a girl, her clothes nearly torn from her back, her legs bloodied. I remember an elderly Negro man, and the shaking of his head. I bought my freedom, he said to me as I probed his ribs. I’m a free man. A free man. A free man. A free man. A free man. He said it again and again, and sometimes his voice was drowned by the god-awful braying of that mule, and sometimes it seemed he whispered into my ear, even long after he was sold, long after I left that place and went directly to the tavern, not even stopping to wash the smell of sweat and blood from my person.