Evenfall (31 page)

“That’ll do, girl,” he says, but before his hand connects with the collar the dog lunges. Neal jerks back and there’s the sound of fabric ripping. Neal’s pants pocket tears open and a faded gray piece of cloth falls onto the floor. The dog releases its hold.

“Jesus Christ. Did you see that? The fucking mutt attacked me.”

He bends to pick up the cloth, but the dog growls again, and he backs away. Cort muscles the dog out the door and down the hall. Andie scoops up the material, and as she does so something falls out of its folds. It hits the ground with a clink and rolls across the room to Gert.

It’s a thin silver ring, and it spins in place a few times before falling to a stop in front of her. She can feel waves of energy pulsating off of it. She stares at it as if it’s a snake, as if it’s something dangerous and sharp instead of what it is, a man’s declaration of love. She makes no move to pick it up. Her heart is beating too fast. The room is spinning a bit. She concentrates on Andie’s face, on her cool blue eyes, and the world slowly comes back into focus.

Andie’s still holding the piece of cloth, bunched in her hands. Gert takes it from her niece and unfolds it. It’s an ancient handkerchief with a large, scripted W on the front.

“W,” Gert murmurs. “For Wildermuth.” She brings the cloth to her nose. It smells of dust, of age, and faintly, of lavender. There’s an ancient streak of mud along one side.

Cort’s come back to stand by Gert. He picks up the ring and holds it up to the light.

“There’s initials here,” he says. “Initials and some writing.” He turns the ring, peering at the inscription. “A.W. to E.W. The rest is in a foreign language. French, maybe.”

The wind hammers against the house and somewhere, an impossibly long ways off, a door bangs. To Gert, it sounds as if it’s coming from the attic. If she breathes deeply, she thinks she can smell the sea.

“I want you out of here,” Andie says to Neal. “Right now.”

“What?” he says. “Over that piece of junk? I found it in the attic yesterday. I’ve been holding on to it to give to you, but the timing just hasn’t been right. If I made a mistake, I’m sorry, okay?”

“Classy,” Cort says. “Give the girl a ring she already owns.”

Andie ignores him. “I’m the one who made the mistake,” she says. “Out. Now.”

Neal moves toward her, and Cort steps in between them. Neal eyes him for a moment, then shrugs. “Fine. Have it your way. But I’m telling you now, this is it. I’m not chasing after you again.”

“Surprisingly enough, I’m okay with that,” Andie says.

“Yeah, well, we’ll see what you say when you’ve calmed down,” he says. He tosses his cigarette into the fireplace, then crosses the room to the hall. Gert hears the front door open, a soft thud as it closes behind him. She turns to Andie.

“I think I’ll sit down,” she says, and then she makes her decision. “There’s more, Andrea. Perhaps you should sit as well.”

It happens quickly. Her niece takes her arm, and they are just settling on the sofa when the air crackles blue. The clap of thunder is immediate, so loud Gert’s ears ring. She can’t hear. Her hair is standing on end, she can feel it, and when she looks at Cort his hair is the same way.

There’s an acrid smell, a metallic tang on her tongue. Lightning must have struck the house. Blue flames dance in the fireplace. They ought to leave, but when she tries to move she can’t stand up.

“Aunt Gert? Aunt Gert? Wake up. We have to go. The house is on fire,” Andie is saying. Gert opens her eyes.

“Frank,” she says.

“She’s stunned,” Cort says. “I’ll carry her.” He bends, lifts her easily. But when he scoops her up and tries to walk, he stumbles, for just a second, over his unlaced boot. The ring slips from his hand, sails through the air and into Gert’s lap. She clutches it. The metal is warm to the touch, and for just a moment the might-have-beens of her own life swirl in front of her, as real and hard as diamonds. She could reach out and touch them, pluck them from the flame—the child, the house, the warm presence at the end of every day. It’s Frank’s face in the fire, and she can hear every word he says, see the images as clear as photos. A good life, he says. It would have been a good life.

He shows her that day at the creek, but this time it is different, the way it should have been. He’s taken the ring from his pocket. She’s holding it in her hands. All she has to do is say yes, and everything will be different. She tries to fit the ring over her finger, but it won’t go.

Somewhere in the distance an engine starts up. There’s the rev of the motor, the whine of the accelerator. The ring slips from Gert’s fingers. Andie bends to pick it up. There’s a thunk and a screech of brakes. A dreadful silence, a howl that shakes the beams of the house, and then the flames lick higher, almost to the ceiling. They spread around the room.

“Yes,” Gert says to the face in the flame. “Yes, yes, yes.”

But the face can’t hear her. Cort is carrying her away toward the door. Someone is calling to her, but she can’t make out the words. She looks back at Andie. “My ring,” she says.

“I have it.” Andie holds up her hand. The ring slides easily over Andie’s finger, sparkling in the firelight. “See?” And then they are outside. Someone else—her sister, perhaps—might have struggled to save the photographs, a quilt, Andie’s baby blanket. But Gert, who is buttressed between Cort and Andie, knows that what matters can’t be destroyed. Gert simply watches it all burn.

GERT
, I call to her from the flames that lick the attic.
Gert
. I think she hears. But then that damn fool hits my dog, and the ring slides over my niece’s finger. Andie will call the fire department. Cort will call the vet. But by the time they get here, we’ll both be gone.

september

THE shipwrights who built Evenfall knew water. They built the house strong, the way they would a ship, with plenty of solid wood to withstand the waves. They caulked it well, to keep water out, using the pitch from local pine trees and filling the seams with cotton and oakum. They fitted the beams together as tight as they could, so close not even a piece of paper could slide between them. They understood water, respected and feared it. What they did not know was fire. They had no sense for it, for the snap and spark of it, the way it could climb a wall, faster than the fastest wave, consuming everything in its path.

The pitch and fiber acted as kindling, spurring on the flames. The dry aged wood, a shipwright’s prize, served as the perfect fuel. Within moments the house was gone, or
mostly so, even as the sirens wailed in the distance, telegraphing the fire department’s approach.

But if the men who had built the house, who had planed each board with care, had seen it after its wreck, when its ruins stood, still smoldering, they would have recognized that the power of fire and of water are closer than they appear. Like water, the fire stripped away the house’s nonessentials, gutting it to its core. Gone were the trappings of the past two hundred years: the flowered wallpaper, the closets filled with clothing, the boxes of keepsakes. The house rose as it might have in the beginning, a simple dark shape against the early morning sky, bare to the elements. Picking through the shell days later, Andie could see the house’s secrets revealed, the layers that hid them scoured away. In the master bedroom, where the wallpaper hung in strips, a tiny charcoal sketch of a boat at sea, drawn above the bed in a heavy hand. Molding around the door of the kitchen was gone, and on the boards left behind two names, Abe and Frank, height marks showing how they hurtled toward adulthood neck and neck, Abe outstripping his younger brother by four inches the year they turned sixteen, the same year the marks charting their growth stopped. And in the corner of the attic, where Andie was not allowed to go, the fire inspector considering the flooring too unstable, came reports of tiny graffiti in the northern wall, the wall with the porthole window that overlooked the land, and beyond it, the glint of the sea.

He’d taken a picture of it, at Andie’s insistence, and later, after he’d gone and the wreckage had cooled, she’d snuck up to see it, her heart pounding with every creak, afraid the stairs
would fall down around her. Yet she was oddly exhilarated, too, the way she’d been as a teen sneaking out at night, doing something forbidden. She’d found her painting, the edges burned away but the center, her aunt Gert, still there, the canvas tangled in an enormous carpet too thick to burn at the far end of the room, most likely blown there by the wind from the broken window before the fire started. She’d found other salvageable items as well—the rocking chair, the sea captain’s chest in the corner, a few old books and maps. And there in the corner, behind where a wooden box of old clothes once stood, was the writing the fire inspector had described. So tiny Andie had to kneel to read it, she could see the same words, written twice, by two different hands. The first was a delicate, feminine script, unfamiliar to Andie’s eyes, but the second, the round, tidy letters of her aunt Clara’s old-fashioned Palmer penmanship, was unmistakable. The words were simple:
Please Lord, bring him back to me
.

Andie knelt looking at them for a long time. By the time she stood up, the early morning haze had burned off and the porthole window filled the space with light. Since she was not supposed to be in the attic in the first place, she saw no reason to mention the writing to her aunt Gert. And over the following weeks, during meetings with insurance adjusters and the fire marshal and the cleaning and restoration companies, when her aunt’s restiveness drove Andie from the cottage into an apartment in town, she found no reason to change her mind.

NOW it’s early morning, and Andie has come one last time to say good-bye. It’s foolish and sentimental, she knows, but still she rose before dawn this morning and drove in the chill morning air, the Nova’s radio cranked as loud as it would go. The maples and oaks that line the road are licked with shades of crimson and orange. As she pulls into the driveway, she sees the house, blackened and gaping, pointing toward the sky.

She’s been here several times since the fire, but still the smell of charred, wet wood catches her by surprise, an olfactory punch to the gut. It’s happened every time she’s come, and she takes a moment, letting her senses tell her what her heart insists can’t be true. The wavy glass that once filled the windows along the side of Evenfall is shattered in a spray as fine as any wave. Pieces glint and shine from the grass. Black streaks mar the outside of the walls. The beams of the attic are visible through the roof; the fire inspector believes the lightning struck there, and the attic took the full brunt of the hit.

Andie gets out of the car and stands. In the weeks following the fire she’s had little time just to look, to take in the image that’s haunted her dreams for days. She notices the details now; the lace curtain, blackened but still recognizable, that hangs from the attic window; the scorch marks along the grass where embers from the house landed; the layer of ash that coats the leaves of the trees.

But it’s not until she gets out of the car and walks around to the front of the house that she sees the table. It’s covered with a blue cloth and the ends snap gaily in the breeze.
There’s a small vase of asters in the center, place settings for two at either end. Champagne flutes. A pitcher of orange juice. And standing behind it all, Cort. He looks different, somehow, and it takes Andie a moment to realize that it’s because Nina’s not with him. Her throat tightens a little bit, and the space around her legs feels emptier than it should.

“Your table is ready,” he says, and pulls out the chair closest to her.

It’s an odd scene, the cheerful table in front of the ruins of Evenfall, and Andie hesitates, still thinking of the big shaggy dog. But then she shrugs, slides into the chair, lets Cort spread a napkin across her lap.

“How did you know I’d come?”

“I didn’t, for sure. But I hoped,” he says. “And maybe somebody might have mentioned your habit of saying good-bye.”

At first she doesn’t understand what he means, and then it comes to her. The mornings Richard came to take her back to school, Andie always rose early, just as the sun was coming up, to walk the acres around Evenfall. The air was cool then, like now, and she’d shiver as she wandered through the meadows, the grass damp with dew. She imagined the frost that would blanket the fields after she left, the ice that would form on the creek, and she’d wonder if the farm would miss her, if some part of it would sleep away the winter days under a covering of snow, dreaming of her return.

Gert must have seen her, all those years ago, and remembered.

“Andie?”

The painting of her aunt’s own early-morning wanderings is packed in the trunk of Frank’s old Nova. Andie has left it untouched, it’s edges blackened and curled, although some day she may add the faintest hint of silver to it, like the ring, warm to the touch, her aunt wears around her neck on a slender silver chain. It’s a reminder that traits can skip a generation, slide sideways, spring up where you least expect them. She knows now what she never saw on those childhood voyages of good-bye—that she was missed, that she was noticed, that she was loved by three people even in her absence. That the thaw at Evenfall came not from summer’s return, but from her own.