Evenfall (6 page)

“Don’t go,” I said, loud as I could. “Don’t leave me here. Stay.” I said other things, too, but it all meant the same. For a second, she looked as if she heard, but then the visiting nurse came up and touched her on the elbow, and Gert pulled the door shut. She hadn’t heard me after all.

But the dog did. The dog did, and that’s what saved me. I’d seen her the first time about six months earlier, a shivering, cringing bundle of fur, no bigger than a basketball. She was crouched outside the front steps, looking as if she’d been waiting there a long time for someone to come out. I used to sit out on the front step just to feel the warmth of the sun, to get out of the shadows of the house, and I remember that day was unseasonably warm for June. I sat there and the dog came over to me. I was pretty weak by then, not given much to moving around, but I went back inside and fished through the trash until I found the meat loaf Gert had brought over the night before for my dinner. The dog ate it as if she’d never had a meal before, and when she was done she just curled up at my feet and went to sleep.

We stayed that way a long time, the dog and me, until it seemed like there was nothing left to do but to bring her inside when she woke up. I was in no shape to care for anything by then, and I knew it was going to get worse, but somehow turning her over to the dog warden seemed like ratting out a friend. I bribed the home aide to pick up a few boxes of dog biscuits for me, and fixed her up a nice little bed in the shed. On cold nights, I brought her in the house with me. I’d have had her in every night, except that I was afraid I’d sleep right through the morning. Gert or the nurse was usually there by nine, and if either of them had seen her there’d have been hell to pay. Especially Gert. Those last few months she was awful to watch, so cool and efficient; it was as if we’d never met before I started dying on her. She’d gotten rid of all the houseplants Clara had collected over the years, just because they needed to be watered once a week. There was no way she’d take care of a dog.

So we muddled along, the dog and me, me sneaking her food whenever I could and her pretty much staying out of the way, until the last couple of weeks when I was too weak to get out of bed. Every now and then I’d see a flash outside the window, and I’d turn my head and it would be her. I’d named her Nina, after a pretty little French girl I’d met up in Boston. They shared the same long black lashes and a way of tilting their heads when you talked. I’d scratched the name on an old dog collar I’d found in the barn. I was going to tell the aide about her, see if we could figure something out, but then it all got really bad and I forgot about Nina altogether.

When Gert walked away that last time, it was as if she’d taken what was left of me with her. I was sliding back into the nothingness again, plunging down and down, when the dog barked. Not a loud sound. A conversational kind of woof, but it stopped me from sliding and let me focus again. She was sitting outside the screened porch, and somehow I was there, too.

I stayed there, not fighting for breath, exactly, but something like it, until the space around me fell into some kind of sense. Like I was concentrating myself into being one cell at a time. It was exhausting. The dog stayed with me all that afternoon, and all the night, too. She didn’t move, just stayed where she was and watched me, her head resting on her paws.

I never believed in ghosts before, and I’m not sure if that’s what you’d call me now, but I’ve had some time to think about the old stories. The ghosts who wail and mutter and bang things aren’t trying to scare the living off; they’re trying to reach out, to connect, maybe in the only way they can. Without some kind of a connection to this world, they can’t survive.

There are other rules, too, other ways to exist, although none so important as the first. As time passed and I grew stronger, I took to exploring the house, room by room, in a way I’d never been able to see it before. The dark, cool molecules of wood; the smooth, slippery atoms of china. Always, I felt strongest in the attic. I learned to control my energy, to keep some in reserve—like a runner in a marathon—so that after the dog left I could continue to exist without her
for a bit. It was easier there, as if the room itself were a power source.

One morning, after the dog had left me, I was in the attic. The dust fragments were drifting through the beams of sunlight coming from the eastern window. In and out, a slow dreamy dance to the floor. The movement captivated me, made me want to follow. If I concentrated hard enough, I thought I might be able to influence their path. I drifted with them, from one end of the attic to the next, and then I felt it—a white-hot burst of energy. A tiny whirlwind of dust motes traveled across the room and vanished over the rocking chair.

It was the ring. I’d left it there more than half a century ago, hidden under a loose board, and I hadn’t touched it in all those years. At times I’d thought about it almost daily—its cool, silver shape; the spidery engraving that encircled the inside—and then weeks or months would go by and I’d forget until something jarred my memory, brought the bitter taste of disappointment to the back of my mouth. But in all that time I’d never touched it, and the ring stayed where it was.

The first time I’d seen it, I was about eleven. Even then, I was drawn to the attic—the dry, woody smell; the still air and the quiet. I’d come up during the beginnings of an afternoon storm. Storms always seemed louder here, the thunder closer. There was lightning just visible over the woods, and the sky was beginning to darken. From its spot at the top of the hill, Evenfall had seen its share of close calls, but this just made the storms more exciting.

I was waiting in that heavy, suspenseful time just before the rain started, and I had my marble bag. I was too old to really play anymore, but I still liked to hold them when I was alone, the cool glass globes pouring through my hands. But one slipped from between my fingers and rolled across the room, disappearing beneath a floorboard. I thought about letting it go, but it was a blue aggie, one of my favorites. The board was against the attic wall, and there was a hole, just large enough for a marble. I hooked my finger underneath the board and pulled up.

The marble was there, but so was something else. A faded square of cotton, folded and tied at the corner, too neatly done to have been placed there by accident. I picked it up, unfolded it, and caught the ring as it fell out. Cool and silver, polished to a bright sheen after all this time. It was a tiny thing, too small to slide over the knuckle of my little finger. I held it up in the darkening room. There was writing inside, and I had just enough high school French to make it out.
Je rêve que j’espère que j’aime.

I jumped at the first crack of thunder. I could hear my mother calling me—she worried about my being in the dark of the attic by myself, afraid I’d light a candle that would burn down the house. I thought about taking the ring with me, but no hiding place I could think of was as secure as where it had been resting. I wrapped it back in the cotton—a handkerchief, I saw, embroidered with the letter W—and placed the bundle back under the floor. It stayed there until I was seventeen, when I took the ring out and kept it in my pocket every day for three months.

Love, rage, bitterness, betrayal—the power behind these emotions is enormous. We feel them in our hearts, in our bones, in the very atoms of our being. A metal object, cool and untainted by human hands, could remain the bearer of those emotions, could contain the energy within it for years. A portable power source, if you will. One made more potent by its history and its hiding place, by the storms and the seas through which it was carried.

Even when I was alive, there were times I thought I could hear the ocean from this attic, landlocked as it is. But now that I’m dead, there are spells, particularly during storms, when the waves seem to crash so loudly I fear the house will wash away.

This house was built by my grandfather, a sea captain whose last voyage took almost two years. During his absence my grandmother’s hair turned white, though she wasn’t more than thirty. When he finally returned, he swore it was his last trip. He’d had enough, he said. He wanted to sleep in his own bed, feel solid ground beneath his feet, and eat apples plucked fresh from the tree, not dried and hardened into leather.

But the house they lived in then was in New London, just a few streets away from the Long Island Sound. My grandfather awoke in the mornings with his eyes already searching for the ocean. The smell of the salt air was like the perfume of a lover, intoxicating him from across the room.

My grandfather was torn. To go to sea again meant the risk of losing all. Even if he navigated his way safely through the storms that surely lay ahead, there were no guarantees
for what he would find when he returned home: He could read the perils there each evening in my grandmother’s eyes as she brushed her long, white hair and gazed into the fire. Yet living so close to the sea was torment.

To escape, he moved his wife and young family as far inland as he could bear. To my grandmother, the new house must have seemed like a reprieve, a testament of her husband’s love. She planted peonies and roses, grapes and apples, filled the house with cut flowers and fruit. She named the farm Evenfall, for the space between the day and the dark. She lived as a happy woman and no trace of her remains, unless you count the harvest the land yields every summer.

But my grandmother was wrong. This house was built not for her, but as a shrine to her rival. My grandfather hired many of the same men who built his ship to construct the house, and their careful reminders of the sea are everywhere, if you know where to look.

I know where to look, now. I rest my hand against the beam that runs the length of the attic and feel it vibrate, like a mast in a high wind. The floorboards creak and slant as if they were at sea. The round window at the peak of the roof is no more than a porthole, really, and in storms I’ve almost seen him sitting there, brought out of the darkness for a split second during flashes of lightning.

My grandmother took one sea voyage herself, the summer her eldest daughter turned sixteen. They traveled to Europe on one of my grandfather’s ships, bringing with them the girl’s two sisters but leaving the baby, a boy of two, at home. My grandfather also stayed behind. The women filled trunks
with the latest fashions, wrote letters describing the salons and dinner parties they attended. They set sail for home on a calm August night, eager to return.

But a storm blew up three days out from land. It savaged the boat, turned it around, tossed it upon the shoals. The captain survived, as did a handful of crew members. My grandmother and her children did not. Her body was found more than a week later, in what state the captain did not say. He buried her remains quickly, saving only her ring, which he returned to my grandfather himself. I dream. I hope. I love.

IN summer the trees are full, but in fall they drop their leaves, and the valley and surrounding land crouches below the house like a cat before it springs. If someone searched very hard, they could just see, from that attic window, the things they hold most dear: the faintest glint of sunlight on water; the white, circling wings of gulls; the remote, unreachable face of the woman they love, telescoping away into darkness.

IT’S ninety degrees and Andie can feel the sweat dripping down her face as she lifts a stack of newspapers tied with twine. She and Gert are in the shed, a euphemistic name for the small building behind the house. In Andie’s childhood it was used to store wood; today the shed is cluttered with old magazines, clay pots, and glass jars filled with screws and nails.

Andie drops the newspapers in the pile she’s designated for recycling and wipes her hands on her shorts. She lifts her hair off her neck in hopes of a breeze. None comes, and with a sigh she turns to her aunt.

“Is there somebody we could call to come pick up this stuff?” For years, Andie knows, Gert has driven once a month to the town dump. But the flotsam and jetsam that’s
collected in the shed over the past forty years is beyond the capacity of one ancient vehicle.

Gert, who is eyeing a box of canning jars, is noncommittal. “I don’t suppose you’ll ever use these?”

Andie just looks at her.

“Fine,” Gert says. “Maybe we can donate them for the church fair. Let’s start a pile for that.”

The shed has a damp, earthy smell. Inside, despite the heat, a coolness comes up from the dirt floor. Andie remembers playing hide-and-seek here, the thrill of waiting in the dimness to be discovered, the almost erotic excitement. And once, the summer before college, she and a date snuck into the shed to escape Clara’s eagle eye and make out.

“Andie!”

She starts and looks at Gert.

“Where were you? I was saying that perhaps we could pay Cort McCallister to take some of these things away. That truck of his is big enough.”

“Maybe.”

Cort isn’t on Andie’s list of favorite topics this morning. She came home from the grocery store yesterday to find Nina curled by the front steps, reeking of manure. It took several scrubbings with Andie’s salon shampoo—the only kind in the house—before the dog was clean enough to come inside. And since Nina vigorously protested, howling and attempting to run every time Andie lost her grip on the dog’s collar, the bath took twice as long.

At the end of an hour, Andie was soaked, her shirt spotted with muddy paw prints. An indignant Nina bolted into
the house the second Andie opened the door, taking cover under the kitchen table and refusing to come out even for the sticks of jerky Andie waved under her nose.

By nightfall they’d reached an uneasy truce. Nina curled on the foot of the bed, her brown eyes watching Andie’s every move. This morning when Andie awoke, the dog was gone. And seeing how the door was locked, Cort McCallister has some explaining to do.

But Cort breaking into the house to free a dog Andie’s not supposed to have in the first place isn’t something she wants to discuss. Especially this morning, when her aunt is already more cantankerous than normal. Despite the heat, Gert insisted on starting with the shed today, even though they both knew it would be a good ten degrees cooler inside the house.