A Sudden Light: A Novel (45 page)

“I failed my son,” Grandpa Samuel said to me. “I failed Isobel. I failed my father.”

Grandpa Samuel fell silent, as did we all. After a moment, he reached for the bottle of medicine, but my father stopped him and took the bottle himself.

“No more medicine for you,” my father said. “We’re going to get you off this medicine.”

My father stood up and put the bottle away in the cupboard.

“We’ll find you a doctor and get your diagnosis sorted out and figure out what you really need.”

He closed the cupboard, and, as he passed Grandpa Samuel, the old man reached out and grabbed his son’s wrist, stopping him. They met eyes.

“Will you forgive me, Son? I didn’t mean to hurt you. I meant to protect you. I was wrong in what I did. I beg you. Please forgive me.”

My father still wore a hard look on his face; he was not disposed to forgive anything. But he looked at me, his own son, and I nodded significantly.

“I forgive you,” my father said.

And that was all it took. Grandpa Samuel burst into a sobbing bout that was truly impressive. Slobbering and snot and waterworks. The whole deal. My father touched the back of Grandpa Samuel’s head. Father leaned into son and they embraced, more or less. A quasi, rigid embrace, and I knew there had been some kind of closure between them, though the wound was so deep, the scar of it would always show.

I left them there in the kitchen; they didn’t need me anymore. I went upstairs to my room, and, from the second-floor landing, I could hear a faint shuffling sound coming from the ballroom. Isobel . . .

Quietly, so quietly, I slunk up the stairs to the second floor, and down the hallway to my room. I grabbed my flashlight and then I slipped up the stairs to the third floor. On the landing, in the antechamber of the ballroom, I paused. The double doors to the ballroom were closed, but I clearly heard footsteps and music coming from inside. I reached for the doorknob. I turned it gently so it made nary a click. I pushed the door open and peered through the crack. And there she was.

How elegant. How lovely. A young woman with her hair up, wearing a long brown dress that billowed and fluttered as she spun on her bare feet. My grandmother. And though it was dark in the room save the moonlight trickling in the windows, though it was hard to see, I was almost sure I recognized those feet. I never had thought of myself as a foot fetishist, but perhaps I had some of that in me, because I
knew
those feet. And I was pretty sure the toenails were painted orange.

“Serena,” I whispered so softly, almost inaudibly, but loud enough for the dancing woman to hear. She looked to the door, then fluttered across the room toward the stage. I rushed into the room and flipped on the light switches. They didn’t work.

The ghost floated around the room and then vanished. I clicked on my flashlight and scanned the dance floor. She was gone. I crossed to the phonograph and clicked it off. And then I heard other sounds. Scratching sounds. I went to the closet with the dumbwaiter shaft and listened closely. I heard grunting, followed by pounding, followed by a scratching, clawing sound. I didn’t dare open the door.

I ran down the stairs to the first floor, past my father and grandfather, through the kitchen, and outside to the fuse box. As I guessed, the same glass fuse was unscrewed; I tightened it. I returned to the kitchen.

“Dad,” I said. “You need to come now.”

He rose from his chair immediately.

“What’s wrong?”

Grandpa Samuel also started to get up.

“Wait here, Grandpa,” I said.

“Wait here,” my father agreed. “We’ll be right back.”

I led my father up to the ballroom; the light switch worked.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“Isobel,” I said. “She was here and she ran into the closet. I trapped her.”

We went to the closet door and opened it. The closet was empty.

“How do you trap a ghost?” my father asked.

“She’s not a ghost,” I said. “She’s Serena.”

I shone my flashlight into the back of the closet, where the hatch was located.

“That’s a dumbwaiter shaft,” I explained to my father. “It goes all the way down to the basement, and it stops on the second floor; maybe there’s a hatch on the first floor, too, but I haven’t found it. I took the shaft down to the basement when I hit my head. I figured Serena was behind the dancing footsteps, so after dinner, I nailed the door shut.
When I came up just now to investigate, I saw her run in here. I heard her trying to pry the hatch open. It
has
to be Serena.”

My father grabbed my flashlight and stepped into the closet. He shone the light against the back wall as he knelt in front of the hatch and looked closely.

“There’s blood on the wall,” he said.

He felt the wall with his hand, found something, and pulled it away.

“A fingernail,” he said.

He held it up for me to see; it was a fingernail, torn from the quick of a finger. It belonged to Serena.

*  *  *

We found her in the bathroom of the servant’s wing, a box of Band-Aids spilled open on the counter before her amid scraps of paper wrappers and discarded backing strips. She was meticulously applying Band-Aids to her fingertips, pulling them so tight.

My father and I stood in the doorway for a long time before she noticed, such was her level of concentration. When she looked up, we could see makeup streaked on her face from tears, and blood on her forehead and cheeks from pushing hair from her face with the backs of her bloodied hands.

“They’ll take forever to grow back,” she said with a sad laugh.

“How long have you been pretending to be Mom?” my father demanded.

Serena sniffed and laughed. “Forever,” she said, pushing past us and moving into the common area. “Forever and for always.”

My father hovered behind her, but Serena wouldn’t meet his eyes. She paused by the kitchen table, setting a hand down to steady herself. She smoothed her dress, straightened her hair, corrected her posture, all in an effort to compose herself. She looked straight at my father and said: “I’m ready to take your questions.”

“Why did you do it?” my father asked, still fixed on her.

“To please Daddy,” she replied. “Why else?”

“Why did you need to please
Daddy
?”

“When you left, he was distraught. Mother had died; you had killed her . . .”

I glanced at my father; it was slight, but I saw the nick from Serena’s blade.

“She was gone,” Serena continued. “And then you were gone. And Daddy was distraught, because he had only me, and I wasn’t good for anything, was I? I was eleven years old: a child. It was only Daddy and me and Riddell House with its creaks and leaks and the history of its pain painted into the walls. You can feel it, can’t you, Trevor? It’s in the walls. It’s in the foundation.”

She looked at me, and I nodded.

“I can feel it.”

“And one night I danced,” she said, crossing over to the couch and sitting down expansively, entirely in control of her narrative. “I could really use a fucking cigarette right now. Trevor, be a dear and fetch Aunt Serena’s cigarettes, won’t you?”

She indicated a cupboard door, and I looked inside. A pack of Marlboros, an ashtray, and a lighter. I brought them to her. She took a cigarette, lit it, and inhaled deeply.

“Don’t be corrupted by my negative influence,” she said to me, exhaling smoke into the air. “Smoking will kill you. I could really use a fucking drink right now.”

“Serena,” my father said sternly. “Why did you need to dance to please Daddy?”

“One night I was thinking of you, Brother Jones. I remembered what it was like to dance with you, when Mother was so sick that to move her hand or scratch her nose was agony for her. And you and Daddy would carry her up the stairs to the ballroom. I knew how painful it was for her, but she wanted to see us dance. And we danced, didn’t we, Brother Jones? We danced. ‘It was a time,’ as Daddy would say. And one night,
when the house was empty because you and Mother had left, I went up to the ballroom to dance with you, even though you weren’t here. I was eleven years old, and I played records and danced because I couldn’t sleep for the loneliness. The following morning Daddy said to me: ‘Did you hear the footsteps last night?’ He said: ‘Isobel is dancing for me.’ And he was so happy. He was so happy that she had come to dance for him that I did it again and again, and I kept doing it. Don’t you see, Brother Jones? It wasn’t a lie; it was a different truth.”

An uncomfortable silence settled upon us.

“I thought—” my father began, but stopped himself.

“There are many truths, Brother Jones,” she said. “There are an infinite number of universes, all existing side by side, or so the scientists say. All existing concurrently. But we have only
this
universe in which to live; we can’t have the other universes. Of all the glorious universes we could possibly have,
this
is the universe we’re stuck with.”

My father tried to digest her words. He wanted to understand. But he didn’t seem able.

“I believed,” he said. “I
believed
.”

“And what’s wrong with believing?” Serena asked him. Serena pleaded with him. “Brother Jones, I want to know. What’s wrong with hoping? What’s wrong with wanting something so badly you can’t stand it? What’s wrong with wanting something so much, you’ll do anything to get it?”

“I don’t know,” my father said after a moment. He dropped down on the couch across from his sister. He closed his eyes, lifted his face to the heavens, and reached his arms out for the sky. “I don’t know.”

“There’s nothing wrong with believing,” she said. She got up from her couch. She moved over to stand before him, and she looked down on his raised face, his eyes still closed; she hovered over him. “And we can
still
believe. I have tickets. I have a stateroom reserved for us. On the
Queen Elizabeth II
. A voyage around the world! Think of it. I’ve never left here. I’ve hardly been off The North Estate. Brother Jones, you and I will sail
around the world
!”

She lowered herself and knelt beside him on the couch, next to him, up against him.

“Sail around the world,” he repeated from his rapturous pose.

She held her face over his, then she kissed him. He accepted her kiss for a moment, but then he snapped to, like coming out of a hypnotic trance. He grabbed her wrists, sat up, and shook his head.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“It’s all right, Brother Jones,” she soothed.

“You were kissing me. Why were you kissing me?”

“I wasn’t—”

He stood up, and, as he did, he twisted Serena’s wrists in a way that made her gasp in pain.

“You’re hurting me—”

“What were you
doing
?” he shouted at her. “Don’t do that again! Don’t you ever touch me like that again!”

“Please let go!” she cried. “You’re hurting me!”

He stopped, as if he suddenly realized his physicality was overpowering her. As if he suddenly saw how large he was and how small she was, how frail she was, how broken. He released her.

“You told Trevor you have the ALS gene,” he said darkly. “It’s not genetic.”

“It
can
be—”

“In the rarest of cases, which this isn’t. You don’t have ALS. You won’t get ALS. You told Trevor that to manipulate him. Everything you’ve done since we’ve been here has been done to manipulate one of us. You lie as easily as you tell the truth—
more
easily!”

“I feel a pain in my nerves—”

“I’m not going with you on a cruise,” my father said forcefully. “I’m going to England to be with Trevor and Rachel.”

“That’s not true! Trevor said that you—”

“It is true. I love my wife, and I’ll go to her if she’ll have me. It doesn’t matter if Dad wanted to send me away or not, or if Mom wanted me to
put her out of her misery or not, or whether I came back to you or not. Because you told me, Sister Serena. You just said it: this is the universe we’re stuck with.”

“Brother Jones!” she wailed.

“I am not going on a cruise with you,” he repeated forcefully. “We are not dancing on the
Queen Elizabeth II
together. We are not visiting exotic lands.”

He started to leave.

“Brother Jones!” she cried out to him. “I’m the one who stayed behind! I’m the one who feeds him every day, who washes his filthy underwear, cleans his vomit when he gets sick, picks up after him like I’m his slave. When I tried to leave, he
promised
me this house. He
promised
it to me so he could keep me here and keep me his slave. And he lied! Give me the house, Jones. You have the power; you can make him do it. Give me this house, Brother, so I can destroy it. Give it to me so I can smash it down and grind it into the earth with the heels of my boots. So I can scrape the ground clean of its filth. So I can chop up the land into teeny tiny pieces and sell it to ignorant people with their ignorant dreams. So I can escape this godforsaken place and run away as far as possible before those stupid dreamers wake up and realize how toxic the soil is here. How corrosive it is to the human soul!”

“It can’t be,” my father said. “It isn’t right. We have to set the universe right.”

“It
is
right!”

“We can sell the things. The silver settings and the china. We can sell the rare books. You can have the money from all of it; I don’t want any. Then you can go around the world on your cruise. You can see the world that you so desperately want to see.”

“How can I leave here? Who will take care of Daddy?”

“I’ll come back and stay with him,” my father said. “Or I’ll bring him to England for a while. What does it matter? That’s a problem that’s easy to solve. And when he finally dies, we’ll do what Elijah and Ben wanted
us to do with the land. We’ll do what’s right. In the meantime, you’ll get your money and you’ll get to travel.”

“I don’t want money!” Serena said. “I don’t want to travel!”

“But you bought cruise tickets—”

“With you!”
Serena cried. “I want to travel
with you
! I want to see the world
with you
!”