Blackbird House (21 page)

Meg Stanley had stood beside Cody as he pleaded with the boy to come out and have a talk.
 
It had been a hot, starry night, filled with the sound of peepers and cicadas.
 
Mrs.
 
Stanley had been crying, and something about her fear was electric.
 
Things could get out of hand.
 
That much was clear.
 
The heat was sickening, too sweet somehow.
 
Cody Maguire said he’d have to phone in to the sheriff to get a team in from the next town over, and that’s when Meg Stanley, who had called in the emergency in the first place, told him to get off her property.
 
She had an expression on her face like she knew where this was going, and she just wasn’t going to let it get there.
 
She could handle the boy, she insisted.
 
If Cody had been more experienced he would never have left Mrs.
 
Stanley there alone.
 
But he was only half a dozen years older than Dean, and he was grateful to be released.
 
He hightailed it to the patrol car, and drove back to the station; even when it was over, he had to compose himself for nearly half an hour out in the parking lot before his nerves were steady enough for him to make his report.

After that incident, Billy Griffon made sure to drive by on his way home from work.
 
If he saw the light on in the kitchen, he figured everything was all right.
 
One evening, he phoned over at the Stanleys’, and when Meg answered, it took him a moment to gather his thoughts.
 
He said he was just wondering if his work was holding up. If any more renovations were needed he could come by and see to them; it would be no trouble at all.

Meg Stanley took a breath before she answered, and for an instant Billy

thought she would say, Yes, I need help, come over right now.
 
But she

only thanked him for his kindness

and told him they didn’t need any work done.
 
“I loved the bookshelves,” she said before she hung up.
 
“I should have told you that before.”

Billy Griffon was the one who found the boy, and some people said that was just his luck.
 
He was driving home from the beach after letting his dog go for a run, going past the Stanleys’ like he always did.
 
It was evening, and shadowy, and the light was funny, with streaks of gold and inky blue.
 
The wind had picked up, and some branches skittered across the road, and all at once Billy’s dog, riding in the back of the truck, started barking.
 
The shadow was across their lawn, where the pear tree stood.
 
Billy Griffon blinked and saw nothing.
 
He blinked again, and saw red.
 
He thought about those pears he had stolen, and about people who couldn’t sleep at night.
 
He thought he would run as fast as he could, and it still wouldn’t be fast enough.
 
How, he wondered, would he explain what had happened to Meg Stanley?
 
The words would tumble out of his mouth one after another, like stones.
 
The words would sink down so far they would never come back, down into the well, drowning them both before he was done.

The dog ran across the lawn, into the pool of shadow.
 
The air smelled like something burning, and like low tide.
 
Billy’s dog barked and tried to jump up, and Billy had to grab him by the collar.
 
He’d named the dog Hugo, but now he just called him Pup.
 
Down, Billy Griffon said.
 
Down, Pup.

He didn’t know what he was supposed to do, but he knew he couldn’t have her see this.
 
The boy had hanged himself from one of the top branches, his belt tied around a strong, thick limb that was sure to hold.
 
Feathers were on the ground below him, as if the birds nesting in the tree had all taken flight at once.
 
There was a single line of gold in the sky now.
 
The rest had all faded.

Billy took hold of his dog’s collar and brought him back to the truck; he put Hugo into the front seat, then went round to the back for his toolbox.
 
He grabbed his ladder and a saw.
 
He felt dizzy in the golden light, with the dry, brown heat of August around him.
 
He thought about the summer when the boy was fourteen, when Meg had held her arms around herself, when he’d wanted to kiss her on the mouth.
 
He didn’t give a damn if it was a criminal offense to tamper with what had gone on here.
 
He propped up the ladder and cut the boy down.
 
It was quick and horrible work, but the thud in the grass was softer than he had imagined.
 
Like a feather falling.

Billy Griffon could hear his dog barking, locked up in the truck, as he walked on to the house.
 
Every step he’d taken in his life was nothing compared to this.
 
Years from now, he’d remember the sweet peas that grew by the door, he’d remember that a catbird had called from its perch in a scrub pine.
 
The carpenters from Rhode Island had done a lousy job, he saw that now, and the French doors they’d put in were crooked.
 
Billy would have been more careful.
 
He would have taken his time.
 
When she told him to get rid of the pear tree, he wouldn’t try to argue with her the way another man might have.
 
He’d just come out here to the property after the leaves had all dropped off, after the fruit had littered the ground, and he’d chop the damned thing down.

THE SUMMER KITCHEN

PEOPLE BUY HOUSES FOR ALL SORTS OF

reasons, for shelter, for solace, for love, for investment.
 
Katherine and Sam bought their summer house because they were drowning, and this was the first solid ground they thought they might be able to hold on to.
 
It was a farm on the outermost reaches of the Cape with white clapboards and green shutters.
 
Two hundred years earlier, oysters had been stored in wooden tubs in the fields beyond the house; turnips and asparagus and sweet peas had grown here.
 
The realtor told them that elsewhere in town the soil was so sandy little could grow, but this land was rich; years of farm manure, and a layer of fertilizer formed from smashed oyster shells, had brought forth acres of peach and apple trees that bloomed pink in the spring and lilacs so tall a person could completely disappear beneath their branches and hear nothing but the humming of bees.

That’s what they wanted, Katherine and Sam both, to crawl beneath green leaves and branches and hide from the year they’d had, the year they were still stuck inside on the day they decided to spend their savings on the farm.
 
They were rapt as the realtor told them there was a hillside of blueberries, the low-growing kind so perfect for jam. There was a fenced garden filled with June strawberries and summer raspberries so tart a single taste could make one’s mouth pucker, along with plenty of room for a vegetable patch of their own making, not that their children a boy and a girl, Walker and Emma, aged ten and six could be talked into eating lettuce and cucumbers, even the homegrown variety.

Of course, they had to imagine all this, as it was January when they stood there.
 
Still, they made an offer on the spot, on impulse, foolishly paying the asking price for a house no one else wanted, one that had been on the market for over a year.
 
But Katherine and Sam were desperate, two drowning people out in the cold with the realtor, watching the sun go down on what would soon be their land.
 
A summer house was never a necessary purchase, but this was a particularly rash decision, a foolhardy whim in a time of chaos, made at the exact hour when most people knew to avoid any serious change.
 
Still, they went ahead with it, a leap of faith designed to convince themselves that, even though there was ice on the ground and a landscape of bleak, bare trees, there would indeed be summers to come, a time when blueberry jam would be simmering on the stovetop, when everyday life was restored.

They’d been released from their duty at the hospital for a single day, this icy afternoon on the Cape that smelled like salt and straw, rescued by dear friends from out of town who took one look at them and insisted they go away and enjoy themselves.
 
These friends had no idea that Katherine and Sam no longer enjoyed themselves, and had in fact stopped talking to each other months earlier.
 
On the ride down to the Cape, for instance, they hadn’t bothered to speak, even though this was their day off.
 
There seemed no point in conversation that didn’t pertain to their daughter’s medical condition.
 
As they drove they looked out the window in silence, two stick figures who continued to exist even though every bit of life had been drained out of them, bled dry by panic and fear.

And yet, when they’d walked down the dirt driveway to the farm, they’d both become giddy.
 
In a fit of crazed good humor, a mood so unusual it felt as though they’d been drugged, they had made their offer, and in doing so they had opened themselves up to hope, to believing that Emma would turn seven in June, that she would pick blueberries later in the summer, make jam, run past the stretch of peach trees alongside her brother, Walker; that she would survive.

They nearly forgot about the house in the spring, when Emma was so improved.
 
It was a delight to have her back from the hospital, to regain a bit of their normal existence, to speak to each other, now and again, about ordinary things.
 
Emma had lost all her hair the previous fall, when her chemotherapy had begun.
 
Katherine had bought her daughter a dozen pretty hats, then locked herself in the bathroom to cry for the loss of Emma’s long, blond hair.
 
Now the child’s hair had begun to grow back, first in a fuzz, then, astoundingly in black tufts.
 
Emma’s prognosis was excellent, and yet Katherine couldn’t allay her panic.
 
Emma’s newly grown black hair made it seem as though she had fallen under a spell.
 
Such things happened, the oncologist assured Katherine.
 
Straight hair turned curly, fine hair grew in coarse and thick.
 
All the same, it seemed like an enchantment to Katherine.
 
The alchemy of how one thing became another was a puzzle that could never be solved: light became dark, joy turned to sorrow, and then for the lucky, for the few to joy once more.

As for Emma, she didn’t mind the new color of her hair.
 
If anything, she seemed to like the fact that it was now black, with waves that hadn’t been there before.
 
Perhaps she valued the change as a sign that she had walked through fire and was still here, an announcement that this was a brand-new Emma, a girl who was well, one so strong she could arm-wrestle with her brother, and nearly beat him at the game.

“I could be a witch for Halloween,” Emma said thoughtfully as she appraised herself in the bathroom mirror.
 
“I could be a Gypsy queen.”

Katherine, of course, never mentioned to anyone, not even to Sam, that when she caught sight of Emma in a darkened hallway the child no longer appeared to be her daughter, that good-natured blonde girl nothing could harm.
 
She was someone different now, the little girl who knew more than she should, a shadow, a sprite, a witch, a queen.

They moved into the house on the Fourth of July weekend.
 
Having plowed through traffic jams, they were sticky with sweat as they unloaded the rental truck.
 
They’d packed up some old furniture from their first apartment and a few pieces Sam had inherited from his mother: a dining-room table, a sideboard, a dilapidated chair so comfortable the children argued over who would sit in it first.

“I think we’re insane,” Sam said when he stopped to survey the house.

He was a big no-nonsense man who rarely did anything on impulse.

“We can sell it next year.
 
Don’t worry,” Katherine told him, although what she really meant was: Don’t walk out on me now.
 
All through the year she’d been afraid he might do that, be so overwhelmed by the possibility of tragedy that he’d leave before it actually happened.
 
“Just this summer,” she begged.
 
“Then we’ll see.”

That weekend they discovered there were quirks about the property. They learned soon enough, because Walker, out to explore the tall grass in their field, came back shouting that there was a tick in his hair.
 
There were burrs stuck to his trousers, too, and he had narrowly avoided a rather large patch of poison ivy.
 
Surprises existed inside as well, none of them pleasant.
 
Pipes rattled, water tasted rusty, two burners on the stove didn’t work at all.
 
The house hadn’t been lived in for more than a year, so it wasn’t a shock to find mice in the hall.
 
But they were only babies, cute little things, and Emma threw a fit when Sam said he would set out poison.

“Don’t you care about the value of life?”
 
Emma had said to her father.

People said long stays in the hospital could do this to a child, make her grow up fast, allow her to see what others might not.
 
Certainly, this was true with the Gypsy queen, who collected each tiny mouse in an egg cup, and carried them to the tick-infested field, where they’d certainly be scooped up by hawks in no time flat.
 
This little witch considered matters of life and death as she danced around the blueberry bushes, willing them to bear fruit, as she rescued spiders, watered the old strawberry plants, which were withered and spent.
 
Katherine’s own black-haired wonder girl, back from the brink, watching for fireflies every night, as if they were the most marvelous sight in the universe, as if just being alive was more than enough.