“Wilhelm loved that boy like he’d never loved anyone else in his life. He used to play records for the boy on the old Victrola in the den, cranking it up so loud that the whole house could hear. Wilhelm would dance around the living room and make that baby just cackle. It was sweet to see, in spite of everything, and for a little while, I’d begun to wonder if maybe everything was going to be all right after all.
“Marlena seemed happy enough, raising Hector, feeding him and reading to him, even though Madeleine had been appointed to be his nanny. Wilhelm had even begun sleeping in the house most nights, instead of staying out to all hours up at the cottage, painting and carousing.
“My boys and I had just finished putting in the new rose garden out back, and were getting ready to start shutting the house up for the fall, putting up the storm windows and getting the woodpile chopped and cut to length. There was even talk of inviting the Wanderers out for the summer again the next year, something that hadn’t happened for two years in a row. They had scattered like dandelion seeds in the years since, like they always did whenever they weren’t camping out in the front yard or in the woods between the house and the cottage, but I had no doubts they’d come back next spring if Wilhelm sent out the invitation.
That never happened, though. And the fall of forty-seven was my last year there at the Riverhouse. That was the year of the big spring flood, and the year that everything finally fell apart at the place. It took a long, long time for that damned house to finally die, but that was when the fatal blow fell, believe you me. And it happened right here, right in this cottage.
“Wilhelm had asked Madeleine to be Hector’s nanny, like I said. It was a strange arrangement, we all thought, and yet Marlena herself seemed pretty much all right with it. The truth is, I think she thought she’d won after all. Whether or not that baby was really hers, she thought that the baby had brought Wilhelm back to her, that she’d finally captured his love. She believed that Madeleine was no longer a threat. Either Madeleine had failed to produce the baby Wilhelm had wanted, and Marlena had, or Madeleine had performed the service she had really been hired for, giving them the baby and allowing them to present it as their own. In either case, I think Marlena believed Wilhelm was done with that younger girl. Keeping her there was Marlena’s way of proving, both to herself and everyone else, that she really had come out on top of the whole thing. She had helped Wilhelm get the son he’d so desperately pined for, and in so doing, she had captured his heart once and for all.
Unfortunately, none of that was true. Wilhelm
was
still seeing Madeleine. Only this time, he was doing it much more secretly. The bastard could be as cunning as the devil himself when he really wanted to be.
It turned out he’d made up a system. Most days, he never saw Madeleine at all. He’d be outside, overseeing me and the grounds crew most mornings, then he’d be up here at the cottage by mid-afternoon. There was no telephone between the house and cottage, not then, and there was no way to communicate between the two. But that didn’t stop him, of course, not when he was in the mind for dickens. That’s when he came up with his little system.
You see, the cottage here is on the highest point of the bluff, and when Wilhelm looked out the little round window on the east of the studio, the one that looked down toward the Riverhouse, he could see the peak of the main roof coming up just over the trees. It was at an angle to him, and there was another window, almost exactly the same size and shape as his own, built into the top of the Riverhouse, right over the porch. He could see that window from his own window up there in the studio. And someone standing inside that
other
window, down at the Riverhouse, if they leaned to the side and looked just right, they could see
his
window up atop the bluff.
Wilhelm’s system was very simple. He’d told Madeleine to check that window every night, before she left. The window was in the attic of the Riverhouse, but there was no problem getting up there. The attic was probably the biggest room in the whole house, full of trunks and crates and endless bits and pieces that the Missus had bought on her trips and never yet found a place for. You got up to it by an angled stair at the back of the house, over the kitchen. Madeleine checked every day, peering out that window in the attic just like Wilhelm had told her to. And when he was in the mood for some shenanigans, he had a very simple sign he’d give her. He’d light a plain white candle and set it in the window on his side. If Madeleine saw it, instead of walking back home to town that night, she’d go up the other way. She’d steal up the trail to the cottage and meet him.
“If Wilhelm had been content with that, things might have ended differently. He might have kept his little secret until he got bored with it, until he sent Madeleine away and found somebody else to amuse him, but he was getting older and flighty by then. No one knows for sure what he was really thinking when he decided to run away with Madeleine. Maybe it was true that she really was the mother of his son, Hector. Maybe what Marlena had thought was true for her—that giving Wilhelm the son he’d wanted had secured his love for her—maybe that was true in reverse. Maybe Madeleine really had been the boy’s mother, and that had made Wilhelm fall in love with her. Maybe it broke his heart to see her acting as the nanny to the boy that really was her own flesh and blood.
Then again, maybe Wilhelm had other reasons entirely. Maybe he’d finally gotten tired of the charade, of the fame and success. Some people—
most
people probably—just aren’t wired to know how to handle that kind of thing. It spoils them from the inside out, takes all the flavor out of life. Hardly anyone believes that, of course, but I’ve seen it up close and personal. I remember it all. The parties and the drinking, all covering over the sadness and desperation. I remember Clearwater bawling on my shoulder like a baby, handing me a gold watch, begging me to take it, like it was a terrible burden, or some kind of mummy’s curse. I’ve seen what success and fame does to people. Maybe Wilhelm was smarter than any of us gave him credit for. Maybe he wanted a chance to taste life for real, outside of the gilded cage he’d built for himself. Wouldn’t surprise me one little bit.
Either way, it happened on May eighth of that year, the day before the first major flood came to the Riverhouse, lapping right up over the patio steps and filling the cellar four feet deep. Took me and my men two weeks to clean it up afterwards, but we didn’t say a word about it. Wilhelm was gone by then, and we figured we would be, too, soon enough. We were glad for whatever work the job still had to offer, slick and muddy and disgusting as it was. It was hard to feel sorry for ourselves, not when we were in the same house as poor Marlena.
“He’d left her a note. I only know that because the housekeeper, a woman we all called Mrs. Wren, told us about it. She’d seen the Missus reading it on the night Wilhelm left. She’d been standing there in the parlor, still as a stone and white as a sheet, reading that note, and Mrs. Wren said you could almost hear the poor woman’s heart breaking. The note revealed everything: Wilhelm’s continuing affair with Madeleine, the white candles in the window, and his plan to leave her forever, to leave her there, along with the Riverhouse and the cottage and everything in them. He was leaving her everything.
“But Wilhelm did take one thing with him. Besides Madeleine, he took the one thing that mattered most to him in the whole world. He took Hector, his son.
“Mrs. Wren told me that Marlena stood and stared at that note for two minutes straight, right there in front of the fireplace with the rain pouring down outside the tall windows. And then, all of a sudden, she let out something like a low scream—a sort of deep, gut-wrenching yowl, and she started toward the house’s front door. She still had the letter in her hand, and by the time she got to the door, she was nearly running. She yanked that door open so hard it hit the wall and left a mark in the plaster, a deep dent in the shape of the door knob. She ran out into the rain, still picking up speed, her feet splashing in the grass as she rounded the house, heading toward the back.
I knew where she was heading even if Mrs. Wren didn’t. Marlena was heading for the trail, meaning to run all the way up the trail to the cottage. I don’t think she could stop herself. I think she meant to find them if she could. Some part of her just got stuck on that tiny hope—that desperate hope that they had stopped up at the cottage for some reason, and were still there, Wilhelm and Madeleine and Hector. Maybe she thought that if she caught up to them, she could talk some sense into him. Maybe she thought she’d be able to say just the right word to change it all.
“I don’t know if she made it all the way there that night, what with the rain and the mud and the rising floodwaters, but some part of me always kind of believed she did. I think she made it all the way up to this cottage, probably panting fit to fall over, wet to the skin, covered with mud and dead leaves. I think she made it inside, all the way up to the studio, her face probably covered with her own tears by then, though nobody’d be able to tell, wet as she was with all that rainwater. I always expected that she found the place empty and dark, except for thing. I knew Wilhelm, after all. I know what kind of man he was. I think she found that white candle still a-burning on the windowsill. He’d probably had it lit for Madeleine, lit it for her to follow as she carried little Hector there to meet him. And after she’d gotten there, he’d just chosen not to put it out. What did he care?
“And as crazy as this sounds—after all, I’d have no way of knowing this, no way at all—I don’t think Marlena put that candle out either. I’ve seen her that way in my dreams sometimes. Truth is, part of me loved that poor woman. Not like she loved Wilhelm, mind you, and not more than I loved my own wife, but I loved her anyway, with a sort of pitiful, sad love. Because she didn’t deserve none of what she got dealt. She may have gotten a little unhinged in the years afterward, and a lot of people may have made fun of her about that, but none of them knew her like I did. None of them saw what she’d gone through, and the loss she’d felt.
“In my dreams I used to see her standing there in front of that little round window, her face lit in the glow of that damned white candle. I’d see her looking out, thinking in her addled, fevered brain that maybe, just maybe, that candle was magic. Maybe if she kept it burning, it’d bring them all back to her. She’d of known it was crazy, but that wouldn’t have mattered, not one little bit. By then, crazy was about all she had left to hold onto. Maybe that candle would bring them back to her, just like it’d brought Madeleine and Hector to Wilhelm as he’d waited there in his studio for the last time. In my dreams, I used to see Marlena just standing there in the dark, lit only by that little yellow flame, dripping rainwater onto Wilhelm’s damned studio floor, still panting a little from her run up the trail, and she’d just be watching. That’s all. She’d just be watching and waiting.”
Earl finished his uncharacteristically long monologue and drew a deep sigh, as if the story had exhausted him.
His voice had grown dry and rough again as he’d progressed, so that by the time he was done it had attained that gravelly rasp that is the strict domain of very old men and lifelong smokers.
Shane shuddered as the evening wind cooled. It pushed aimlessly around the patio, rustling the leaves and singing momentarily in the back door screen. Brian had long since finished his beer, but both Shane’s and Earl’s were still a third full. Earl looked down at the bottle in his hand for a long moment, and then finally raised and emptied it expertly, his Adam’s apple clicking up and down on his stubbly neck.
In the wake of the story, Shane felt strangely detached, almost ethereal. After all, listening to Earl hadn’t been like hearing a story he’d never heard before. A lot of the details had already been familiar to him, if only vaguely. The effect of Earl’s story was similar to what someone might feel after watching half of a movie with the focus and sound out of whack, leaving the picture blurry and muffled, only to have the projectionist come back from a long bathroom break and fix the film, bringing everything into crisp, clear focus.
Shane had known a lot of the general details already, had picked them up from his paintings and his dreams, from the secret osmosis of living with the ghost of Marlena herself. Very little of Earl’s story had surprised him, not even the very end. Shane had found Hector’s rattle in the woods, under the bench, probably dropped by the boy himself as the nanny, Madeleine, had carried him along the trail on that fateful night. Maybe Madeleine had heard the rattle drop, but had been in too much of a hurry to stop for it. Or maybe it had been raining even then, drowning out the sound of the little rattle. Maybe Hector himself had been crying, upset at being carried out into the darkening woods and the cold rain. Either way, the rattle had fallen, tumbled into the flowers growing around the bench, and Marlena had probably run right past it on her way up to the cottage, had likely splashed it or even stepped on it during her hectic passage. The rattle had lain there for the intervening decades, glittering hotly throughout dozens of summers, frozen in the dark of endless snowfalls, just waiting for Shane, of all people, to come along and find it in the science fiction year of two thousand nine.
