Farthest House (9 page)

I watched Luessy, trying to keep focused on her arrival
there,
rather than on what her leaving would mean here. I thought of how it would affect Tory. The hour Jeannie died, Tory was in her room, pacing, wringing her hands with nervousness. My beautiful Tory, once a child of wild hair and sparkling emerald eyes, grown too soon, and unable to watch Death yet again, to bear witnessing that too-close ghost’s rattle. Was she pacing now? Or were her hands steady on her tumbler of sherry, death easier with the numbers?

When Willow’s two new drawings were added and everything was arranged to her liking, she marveled. On the wall she didn’t need to be fixed. On the wall, she danced and wasn’t disfigured to match her soul.

Admiring her one-girl show, she thought of pretty Mary Wolfe, her old friend who wouldn’t be her friend anymore. What would Mary say if she saw the drawings and watercolors? Sometimes, at recess, or after school when no one watched, Mary came too close and put her mouth by Willow’s ear. “Do you still draw pictures?”

“No,” Willow always lied.

She turned and faced the bed again. Mémé hadn’t changed her position, but she trembled, looking like a child who’d fallen or was pushed from a tree. Realizing she left Mémé entirely exposed, and Mémé hadn’t been able to cover herself, Willow ran the few steps, reaching the end of the bed, making the whole bed bounce as she crawled up the mattress. She pulled the blankets over them, tucking them under Mémé’s chin and then her own, willing Mother Moses to help make Mémé warm again. She snuggled still closer and felt cold striking her legs. A wet cold, and for a moment she didn’t understand. Then she realized Mémé had wet the bed, and the moisture had chilled in the open air. She threw her arm across her grandmother’s chest, hugging her, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Luessy lacked the strength to answer.

Only babies wet the bed, Willow knew, and doing it when you weren’t a baby was the worst thing. No one could know, and this
worst thing
was her fault. She’d spent too long hanging up her pictures and being proud. “I’m really sorry,” she tried again. “I’m really, really, really sorry.” She rubbed Mémé’s arm, trying not to cry, and then raised herself onto one elbow and patted Mémé’s cheek. “Mémé, I’m sorry. I love you.”

She didn’t know what to do. Mémé couldn’t get up and change her bedding and nightgown. Mable was gone, and Tory was too mean to ask. Going to Tory would be the same as
telling
on Mémé. There was Papa, but he was working, and even if she could reach him on the phone, he was too far away to help and couldn’t come in the snow. He’d tell her to put Tory on the line. Jonah was strong and he would help. She was sure that even with the dark and snow she could find his house at the back of the garden, but she couldn’t sneak him upstairs without Tory knowing. If Tory caught him, she’d be furious, and anyway, Jonah couldn’t see Mémé naked because he was a man.

She could see her grandmother without clothes, but she couldn’t lift Mémé. If she were as strong as other fourth graders—with two good arms—maybe she could, but she wasn’t.

The smell of old urine, as though Mémé were rotting inside, and the decay had come out between her legs and seeped up from under the blankets, made Willow gag. She hoped Mémé hadn’t heard. She gagged again. “It’s okay,” she whispered, “it doesn’t stink very bad.”

A breath of sound, “Willow …”

Pulling herself up on one elbow again, Willow pressed her ear to her grandmother’s mouth and strained to hear more. Was Mémé trying to say she still loved her and wasn’t angry? No other sound came, and Willow sank back down, nudging against her grandmother, harder this time, trying to shove her out of the wettest area, pushing her own legs deeper into the cold. She scrubbed at tears. She deserved to be there. “You still love me. Don’t you!”

Tory appeared, already halfway across the room, her nightly glass of sherry in hand. Seeing her, Willow jumped. In her mind, Tory could move through the house, coming and going without sound and staying invisible until she appeared just inches away. Did she love to scare Willow, or like Sister Dominic Agnes, did she want to catch her being bad?

At least Tory didn’t have her sewing basket with her. Papa liked how his sister made dolls for poor children, but Willow hated seeing the dismembered arms and legs stuck full of pins and looking as though they’d been torn off soft bodies. And heads, too, with sharp pins run through their empty faces, marking the placement of absent eyes, noses, and lips. To Willow, the pins were just the sort of thing doctors would do to her given the chance.

Studying the emaciated figure of her mother, the red in Tory’s glass began to shiver. Her mother looked grave. She caught hold of her emotion, turning to Willow. “Why are you crying?” And at Willow’s shrug, “Go on, it’s time for bed.”

Willow wanted to go to her own bed, but she wouldn’t leave Mémé or let Tory discover the wet. She gripped Mother Moses. “I’m supposed to sleep here. Mable said so.”

“Did she eat anything?”

On the floor, Friar hadn’t moved since his meal, and Willow told her eyes not to look at him.

Tory hesitated a moment longer before leaning over the table, blowing out the last candle, and starting for the door. “Sleep there if you want, I don’t suppose it matters.”

In the quiet, motion at the dark turret windows caught Willow’s attention. Nickel-sized white flakes swooped inward, the snow kissing the glass and melting. Then movement from Mémé’s desk where the top sheet of paper Willow had pushed to the corner earlier drifted to the floor.

Making sure the blankets didn’t lift this time, Willow wiggled out and ran for the page. Her damp dress, especially a wet place along the hem, stuck to her leg. Her mind said,
Yuck, yuck
. She crawled back into bed with her treasure. Fighting an urge to throw up, she wedged her legs into the wet.

The tiny black words swam and made her rub her eyes again. She knew many of them by heart. Week after week, Luessy had read the lines to her. Familiar words here and there helped her remember whole lines.

“The soul,
Forever and forever…
longer than the soil is brown and solid
longer than water ebbs and flows….”

She read as slowly as she could, spending the words as carefully as nickels and dimes, wanting them never to run out.

“I will make the true poem of riches,
to earn for the body and the mind whatever
ad…here…is, adheres,
and goes forward and is not dropt by death.”

Mémé was listening. Willow felt sure of it, and she turned the page over, reading words Mémé had underlined.

“Of your real body…
item for item it will ee…lude
the hands of the cor…pus, corpse-cleaners
and pass to fitting spheres….”

A tear rolled from Mémé’s eye, moving down the side of her face and into her thin hair. Willow had never seen her grandmother cry, and the sight made her moan. She let go of the page she’d been holding and using a finger, pushed the next tear back towards Mémé’s eye. The skin under Willow’s finger stretched and smoothed, as though she pushed through frosting.

She tried again to read. She wanted to read louder than the pounding in her chest, louder than how sorry she was, louder than Mémé’s tears, and louder than the awful, quitting sounds coming from Mémé’s mouth.

Friar stood and whined, as he paced back and forth at Luessy’s bedside. He trotted to the foot of the bed, and despite Mother Moses, jumped up. On his belly, his tail dragging behind him, he used his forelegs and pulled himself over the crocheting to Luessy. He dropped his head on the rise of her stomach and lay still, staring off into the room.

The weight of her grandmother’s body leaned against her, but Willow knew Mémé had left her.

12

The bed trembled. Willow shook so hard her legs kicked in tiny jerks. She’d never lain beside a dead person. She didn’t know what she should do. She knew you weren’t supposed to disturb the dead. Would sliding away, if she didn’t hardly move the blankets one inch, be disturbing the dead?

Lying beside Mémé, without a clock in the room and no moon or stars sliding across the windows to prove the passage of time, she felt like she was in a strange world where time didn’t exist at all, where being rescued might never happen. She shut her eyes tight but was afraid to scream. She wanted Tory to hear from down the long hallway and through her closed door, but even the thought of screaming added to Willow’s fear. What if she screamed, scaring herself more, and still Tory didn’t come?

She cried for Papa to come and for Mémé to stop being dead, and for her own shaking, so hard her knees bounced together, to stop.

I sat beside her, tried to sooth her, until finally her body gave into exhaustion, and she sank into a fitful sleep. She dreamed she ran through a forest of thick black trees, and no matter how loud she screamed, no one came to help. She dreamed she stood on the steps of Our Lady of Supplication, a black chain binding her to Sister Dominic Agnes, and Mémé, her cat-head cane tapping, walked by and away, never turning to see Willow.

She woke having to go to the bathroom, and her head pounded and buzzed as though filled with a hive of Jonah’s bees, angry bees. She couldn’t see Mémé’s face without turning, which she wouldn’t do, but Friar was still with her, and so she wasn’t alone.

She rolled away. Mémé’s body shifted. Standing at the far side of the bed, panting with fear at how Mémé had moved, Willow thought even of crawling back in. Mémé couldn’t be dead, couldn’t be. But her skin had changed to the wrong color, as had her lips, and her eyes looked too deep, poked in. Only her hand on the spread looked right, though the ribbon had dropped onto her chest. Willow hurried around, picked up the piece of sky, and because Mémé couldn’t hold it, Willow wove it through her grandmother’s cold fingers.

Mémé had sky again, and Willow rushed across the carpet and over the last few feet of wood flooring and into the hall. Friar watched, his head not lifting from Luessy. “Come,” Willow whispered. He didn’t stir. “Come Friar, you have to come.” The urine on Willow’s dress had dried and smelled worse now. “Come,” she begged. “Please come with me.”

The blessed dog rose, stepped off the bed, and with his tail hanging went to Willow and let her press her face into the ruff of his neck and hold onto him.

In the bathroom at the near end of the hall, away from Tory’s bath at the far end, Friar kept close to Willow. She sat on the toilet wondering how it was possible that everything looked the same. White towels were still folded and stacked on their white shelves. The bathtub still sat with its claw feet pointed straight ahead, as though it might get up and run. The black and white floor tiles still ran in straight lines. Standing naked and washing her legs, her clothes rolled into a ball that she would hide under her bed, she could see that even her back was the same. She told herself Mémé was there, too, watching her wash, reminding her to hang up her washcloth, and waiting while she put on clean pajamas. “She is, isn’t she Friar.”

She was certain Mémé didn’t want her to sleep in her room across the hall. Mémé wanted her to sleep in the attic, in the white cottage bed where the two of them often took afternoon naps. With Friar at her heels, she followed Mémé up the main attic staircase, hearing the sound of the stairs sighing just ahead of her, each one bearing and releasing an invisible weight.

She woke hours later to the sound of her name being called. The attic with its white floor, walls, and ceiling held the faintest light, not morning light, or moonlight, but an ethereal light.

Luessy stood at the foot of the bed looking radiant. I wasn’t as surprised to see her as she was to see me. She’d been so sure that Willow and I were the same person.

Willow stared at Mémé’s appearance. Her grandmother looked thirty years younger than Willow had ever seen her. She stood whole and solid, not floating on a wire like pretend angels in a school play, not with clouds swirling around her feet like holy cards of Jesus. She also stood taller than she had before, and her back was straight.

For every inch of Mémé’s new health, Willow felt more disfigured and alone. This Mémé wasn’t old and didn’t need a cane or pictures on her wall. This Mémé didn’t need to be read to, and she didn’t need Willow. She had plans and meant to leave and be happy away from Willow.

The younger, not-Mémé nodded toward the foot of the bed. Willow’s gaze followed the direction. Mother Moses lay folded in a thick pad, and on top lay a fresh-picked Damask rose.

Mother Moses had been down on Mémé’s bed a floor below, and Willow knew exactly where in the summer garden the Damasks bloomed. But a winter storm blew outside, and the roses had been pruned and wrapped in burlap. She looked back up. Mémé was gone.

As the heater churned in the basement and north winds buffeted, the wood, brick, and glass of Farthest House creaked and sighed.

In the morning, the sound of Papa hurrying up the stairs and into the attic startled Willow awake. Sun reflected off the snow outside, bouncing light up the three stories and over the creamy walls. Papa stepped into the attic, his face relaxing on seeing she was all right. He crossed the room and squatted beside her bed. “Willow, I have something to tell you.”

She slapped her hands over her ears. Her body wouldn’t be still. She sat up, rose to her knees and slumped, sitting back between her heels. “Where’s Friar?”

“He’s all right.” Julian’s eyes searched hers. “You know? Your grandmother has died.”

Her hands slid from her cheeks and came down together, steepled as if she meant to pray. Then her fingers spread and clasped together, and her hands formed a tight ball. Mémé wasn’t dead. Dead meant you never moved. Dead meant you were buried and turned into ashes. That’s why there was Ash Wednesday. But she’d seen Mémé young and moving, and that was different from dead. Mémé had pulled out of her old skin like a locust, leaving Willow behind. “She’s not dead.”

Julian had no soothing words for death. Losing Jeannie still hollowed out a pit in his stomach. He sat down on the bed beside Willow and stroked her sleep-tousled hair. “She loved you very much.”

Willow flopped back, away from his touch. She remembered Mother Moses and the rose. If they weren’t there, she couldn’t be sure Mémé had visited in the night. Mémé might only have been a dream, and if only a dream, then Papa was right and Mémé was dead. Never-coming-back dead. Jeannie dead. If the things were there, then Mémé was alive, maybe not in the regular way, but alive, which meant she could visit again if she wanted.

Her heart leapt, and she rolled up onto her knees again and flopped forward and stretched out, grabbing the flower and back, almost crawling into Julian’s lap. She told the story as quickly as she could—except for how Mémé’s back was straight.

When she finished, Julian couldn’t speak. How many times had he asked for some small sign from Jeannie? Anything.

“They mean she’s not dead,” Willow said.

He pulled her close, pressing her cheek against his chest and setting his hard chin on top of her head. “She is dead, Willow. I don’t know how to explain this.” He indicated the crocheting and the rose. He didn’t want to destroy whatever fantasy Willow needed to tell herself, and so he wouldn’t insist the things were carried up by either Tory or Mable. “Your grandmother loved you, and she still loves you, but she’s gone.” He realized for the millionth time that the same applied to Jeannie. She was gone, and if she sent signs, tossing coins into his path or white feathers, the tokens wouldn’t change the fact that he was never going to hear her laugh again, never going to hold her again, never going to carry her to their bed.

On Tuesday, the morning of Luessy’s funeral, Willow woke with a start. She and Papa had spent the night at Farthest House, and she could hear Tory yelling from the floor below. She hurried into the hall in her pajamas and across to peer again into Mémé’s room. The mattress was gone, the bed stripped to the box springs, the door to the attic shut tight, and the wall of her pictures bare. No one had asked if she wanted her drawings, and though she supposed Mable knew if they’d been thrown into the trash, she didn’t want to ask. For two reasons, she hoped they had been. If Papa saw them, he’d be sad to see how many secrets she kept from him. And it was because of the pictures that Mémé died.

Again, the sound of Tory yelling from the kitchen echoed through the tree of the foyer and up the stairs. Knowing Papa was in the house gave Willow courage, but she pressed her back to the wall at the top of the stairs and slid as much as walked down. Tiptoeing across the foyer, she stopped behind the kitchen door and peered in through the split between the jamb and the door. Lumpy dishtowels covered cakes and pies on the counters. She stretched to try and see more.

Papa sat in a chair, not facing the table, but his long legs stretched out parallel to it, one elbow on the oak for support. Willow could see, as well as I, that he hadn’t been up long. Still barefoot, he wore blue jeans and a flannel shirt left open, the way he dressed in the mornings at home, coming into the kitchen to start coffee and Willow’s toast, not bothering with shirt buttons before stepping into the shower.

While his clothes reminded Willow of their regular life, nothing on his face or in his posture did. He sat slumped, as though Tory’s yelling whacked him down. His eyes were shut, and his mouth formed a hard line. When he came to the attic for her and told her Mémé was dead, he was sad, but this sadness was different.

“Stop and think,” Tory said, her voice ripe with irony, “how much it would hurt Mom’s reputation and the good name she cared so much about. Jonah, too. How much are you willing to put him through? Jail time? Even Willow, what would it do to her?” She paused and with more emphasis, “I’m your sister. You owe me, Julian. Cop.” She stopped, letting the words sizzle in the air. Then, “You lied to me.”

Julian’s elbow shifted on the table, his palm rose, and he dropped his forehead into it, hooding his eyes as if to shut Tory out.

Careful not to lose her balance and make the door bang, Willow shifted her weight to see more. Tory wore a narrow black dress that reached to mid-calf. On her feet were long black pumps. Her hair was knotted tight at the nape of her neck, her lipstick red.

It’s not fair,
Willow thought.
Papa was tricked.
He came into the kitchen just to have coffee with Tory, but she’d gotten up earlier, dressed, and waited for him. Willow wanted to crash into the room and tell Tory to
shut up!
She wondered why Papa wasn’t defending himself.

A shadow on the ceiling above his head caught her eye. Thin and gray at first, she tried to ignore the gloom. As she watched color draining from her father’s face, the stain darkened, morphing through several shades until it reached black ink. The shape began to tremble. She closed her eyes, willed it gone and looked again. The sight pushed her to her knees. Out of the blackness, wings were forming, heavy and thick with plumage. Her heart pounded as she felt the drag and weight of the wings struggling to loosen themselves, as if unearthing from a grave.

Then it happened. Papa’s head lifted from his hand, dropped back, and his face lay exposed to the ceiling. The black—a table-sized raven now—peeled off the ceiling, talons and keen eyes swooping down. The specter shadowed Papa’s face, seemed to bleed into it, and vanished.