Evenfall (9 page)

This house should have been cleaned out years ago, Gert thinks. She should have done it when Frank got sick. If she’d started even a month ago, she could have done it without her niece around to witness Gert’s unraveling over the debris of a life gone by.

“I’m sure someone could use that, Andie,” she says. “It’s expensive material. Save it for Goodwill.”

“But it’s stained. See?”

“Fine. If you know what to do with it, why bother to ask me?” Soon, Gert knows, her niece will quietly pack her bags, call the town’s only taxi service, and drive away. Gert doesn’t blame her. If she could leave herself, she would.

But today Andie doesn’t go anywhere, just glances at her sideways and places the dress on the Goodwill pile. They empty the rest of the closet in silence, not talking beyond the occasional “Excuse me” as their shoulders bump. Andie doesn’t ask Gert’s opinion outright again. Instead, she handles each dress just long enough for Gert to comment if she chooses to. She doesn’t.

Andie’s worked her way to the back of the closet and is pulling out shoes, the ugly, thick-heeled ones made for older women who spend too much time on their feet. Each time she emerges, she tosses a pair into the discard pile.

“Hey, what’s this?” Andie asks. Gert turns to look, expecting another pair of shoes, but the box her niece holds is too large. Andie carries it to the bed and lifts the top off gently.

“Photos, Aunt Gert. Look.”

Gert would rather not. There’s nothing here she wants to see. But she can’t keep rebuffing Andie. Gert’s never been the aunt known for holding on to things, but today she makes an effort.

“I see,” she says, glancing at the top layer. The photos are in color, and are mostly of Andie: dressed in a yellow graduation gown, Clara, Frank and Gert clustered around her on the college green; holding a white rose onstage at her high school commencement program; sitting on the porch stairs as a gap-toothed seven-year-old, Clara’s arm around her and a glass of lemonade by her side. If you didn’t know better, if you excavated this box a hundred years from now, you’d think the girl in the photos had had four parents, instead of one.

But Andie sees something different. She scoops the top layer of photos out and places them on the bed, heedless of where they fall. The colored shots give way to black-and-white photographs, and Andie picks one out and holds it like a prize.

“You know, I’ve never understood why there weren’t more photos of the three of you,” she says. “Aunt Clara must have been saving these for a scrapbook or something.”

“We simply didn’t take that many photos back then, Andie. We were too busy living our lives to document them,” Gert says. “And film and cameras and the like, all were expensive.”

There’s a faint thrumming, a whispery sound, coming from the corners of the room. Gert looks around but sees nothing, decides she’s imagining the noise. She turns back to the closet, hoping that her brisk example will spur Andie back to work and away from the photos. But Andie’s having none of it.

“Whose car is this? Where are you all going?”

“I have no idea, Andie. That was all a very long time ago.” Her eyes skim the photo and move on, back to the closet, as if there’s nothing more fascinating than the clothes hanging there. And really, nothing is. Gert’s lived the life in the photographs already. This is all that is left.

The air in the room is thick with heat and the thrumming is getting louder. She glances at her niece to see if she’s noticed, but Andie is oblivious.

Gert rubs her temples. There is something about this house that sets her on edge and has since the day she first entered it, the dirt-poor daughter of a drunken farmer. She’d known who Frank was, of course. Everyone in town knew the Wildermuth boys. Abe was four years ahead of her at school, Frank two years behind. He’d had the most beautiful eyes, even as a child. Not that it mattered. In Hartman there were only two classrooms, so small everyone knew one another, so compact it was easy to see who had food at lunch each day and who went without. There may have been plenty of times when Gert went hungry, but she still had pride. She’d felt Frank’s eyes on her, but she never looked his way. Except once. The first day of school, she’d felt the strength of his gaze, and when she brushed up against him on her
way into class, it was as if she’d taken her first breath of air, like she was awake and alert for the first time. She found she was trembling. But she’d have been damned before giving anyone the slightest reason to say a Murphy was setting her cap for a wealthy beau. She made it to her seat without stopping that day, and through the rest of high school without exchanging more than a handful of words with either of the brothers.

She’d have made it the rest of her life without seeing Hartman or the Wildermuth brothers again, too, if she hadn’t gotten the call to come home during her last year of nursing school. Years of hard drinking and harder living had finally caught up with her father in the form of a stroke.

She recognized the irony. As a child, after all, she’d prayed for his death. Now, as she wiped the drool from his face and changed his soiled sheets, she saw how the answer had come, just not early enough to save her. After her mother’s tearful call to the school, the director of nursing herself had put Gert on the train home. She was a good student, the woman had told her, but family had to come first. She’d try and hold Gert’s spot, but there were so many worthy girls and so few scholarships she could make no guarantees.

She hated everyone that summer. Her father, for taking so long to die. Her mother and Clara, for being oblivious to what life offered. Herself, for knowing. And the minister on Sundays, for his endless sermons, a purgatory of sorts: They kept her from the hell of home, but offered no glimpse of a deeper salvation.

Until after service, standing on the steps outside, she
noticed a slim figure in pressed cotton trousers and a clean shirt. It was his eyes that caught her attention and wouldn’t let her go. Like cat’s eyes, Gert thought, watching Clara brush invisible lint off his shirt.

She found she could talk to him now. She was a nurse, after all, or almost a nurse, not just a farmer’s daughter. They’d talked about Hartman and how little it had changed, about Boston and her classes. When he touched her bare arm to draw her attention, she shivered. Her sister, Gert saw, had the good sense not to ask him home, but he offered to take them for a drive after dinner in a way that made Gert think it wasn’t the first time. When Richard, still in short pants, clamored at his elbow, he good-naturedly included the boy in the invitation, too.

“Frank Wildermuth?” Gert had whispered when he’d left. “How long have you been seeing him?”

“A few months,” her sister said, removing her gloves as they walked along the dusty side of the road to their home. “Not long. He’s nice. But his mother…” She made a face.

“His family owns half of Hartman, Clara. You know what people will think.”

“He can’t help what his family has, no more than we can help what ours doesn’t have. Besides, who cares what people think?”

Gert thought of Mrs. Wildermuth, a thin woman with hands that constantly fluttered about her face, like small birds struggling to be free. She’d hovered by the side of the car the whole time Frank had been talking, making no move to join the group on the stairs. The only thing that would
scandalize the neighbors more than news that one Murphy girl was dating a Wildermuth would be whispers that two were. And yet she found herself unable to stay away.

At school Gert has nothing but scorn for patients who follow the cool glass vials of morphine with their eyes like a lover, who twitch restlessly beneath the sheets while the needle is being drawn. No one has ever clung to Gert during rounds, begging for more even when the charts forbid it. By twenty, she’d developed an immunity to wanting anything too much and contempt for those who did. Which is why the feelings that flood her every time Frank’s name is mentioned take her by surprise. She flushes, then grows pale in fear that someone will see. When they meet for the first time alone at the creek, after a month of denying what is happening, she’s amazed by how easily she’s able to lie about where she’s been to Clara and her mother. A part of her doesn’t care if they find out, that’s how badly she wants to be with him. For the first time, she finds herself thinking of those patients with something approaching sympathy.

When his mother drives to New London to visit friends for the day, Frank invites her to the house. He’s made tea and serves it around the back, where no one will see them. He’s left the kitchen window open, and when a slow song comes on the radio, he bows and takes her in his arms. He’s taller by a good bit. In her flat walking shoes, her hands just reach his shoulders.

After they’ve eaten, he takes her inside and walks her through, room by room. The house is filled with silk throws, dark heavy furniture, even Oriental rugs, and Frank points
to each object and tells her where it’s from: the tea set his grandfather brought back from China, the sampler his grandmother stitched with silk thread. It’s not that he’s house proud, more that each item reveals a bit about his family and himself, and he wants to have no secrets from her.

At home, Gert’s mother braids her own rugs and cuts pictures from women’s journals to decorate their walls. Gert might not be used to luxury, but she doesn’t mind it. It’s not till the attic that she starts to feel uneasy. They look through the round window, Frank showing her the lands spread below and the ribbon of road like a gift, as if all she had to do was say yes to accept. When he puts his arms around her waist and nuzzles her neck, she feels the first prickles of warning, as if they are being watched. She glances around, but no one is there.

“Shhh,” Frank murmurs, as if he senses her unease. He turns her to face him, cupping her head against his shoulder as if she were a child. His shirt smells faintly of lavender and of cotton, warmed by his body heat. “Shhh. It will work out.”

Work out for whom? she’d wanted to say, but didn’t. No matter what happened, someone would lose. In the end, it seemed that everyone did. Except maybe Clara.

Gert’s staring at the closet, counting up the losses, when Andie’s voice breaks into her reverie.

“Aunt Gert?”

It’s with effort that Gert drags her mind back into this room, into this body that is no longer twenty. She blinks, as if she’s just walked out of the forest and into the sun.

“Aunt Gert?” Andie asks again, worry edging her voice.

“What is it, Andie?”

“We’re just about done here, I think. If you want, I can finish up myself. Or we can take a break for lunch.”

When Gert was Andie’s age, she imagined old age as a calm, desiccated state, a desert of the emotions, and longed for that peace. At almost eighty, she still does, and wonders when it will come.

“No, thank you, Andie. Let’s finish the job, and then we’ll rest.” She pulls a particularly ugly print dress out of the closet, drops it in the trash pile, and brushes her hands briskly together. Even if she can’t completely banish her emotions, Gert’s learned how to keep them under control.

There’s a noise behind her, a long slow sigh, and at first Gert doesn’t realize it is Andie—she thinks it is somehow connected to the whispery sound that’s still echoing in her ears. There must be rats in the attic, she decides, and makes a mental note to remove Andie’s Havahart traps and call an exterminator when she gets home.

But then she sees the photo in her niece’s hands. The picture is black and white, but Gert knows the dress she wears is blue cotton, sprigged with tiny white flowers. Although you can’t see it from the camera’s angle, the dress is stained in the back, a combination of green moss and dirt, from where Gert’s body pressed into the warm creek bank. He’d spread a handkerchief on the ground for them to rest on, an old-fashioned one with an elaborately scripted W, but it was too small to be of much use. On her face is a look of joy so real, so fragile, Gert can’t bear to look, let alone remember. She turns away.

“You look so happy,” Andie says, wonderingly.

The whispery sound is getting louder, filling Gert’s ears.

“Who is that in the woods with you?”

Gert glances quickly at the photo where her niece is pointing. There’s a shadow, the faintest suggestion of a figure, to the right and behind Gert. The shape is tall and slender. It could be the movement of the trees in the wind. It could be a spot on the film. It could be anything.

Gert sits on the bed. The noise is a rushing now, like the sound of a stream running. There’s something wrong with my heart, she thinks, and struggles to remember if she took her pills this morning. Atrial fibrillation, according to the young physician who took over last year for Dr. Cushing. “It means your heartbeat is irregular,” he explained, speaking slowly as if Gert were ninety-two and senile instead of someone who had been caring for people since before his parents were in diapers.

She rubs her temples, eyes closed. No matter what the doctor says, no matter what medication she takes, it won’t help. The truth is, her heart has been frozen for years. Now when for some reason it has started to beat, it can’t quite remember the rhythm. Instead, it’s bumping along as fast as it can, leaving Gert no choice but to pay attention.

The memory of that afternoon has been with her for over half a century, a touchstone that reminds her joy once existed. Sitting in the rose-smothered room, surrounded by her dead sister’s belongings, it occurs to Gert to wonder, not for the first time, how she ever let it slip away.

FROM the attic window I watch Gert walk away. Andie’s following, worried, I suppose, but Gert pays her no heed, just doggedly continues on in the direction of the cottage. I press my fingertips against the windowpane and feel the molecules slide and shift beneath my weight, smooth as ice. I want to shatter the glass, let it fall like knife-sharp rain. I want to run down the stairs and block her path, grip her by the shoulders until she’s finally forced to see me. I want to take her in my arms and weep.

But what power I have is featherlight, the merest echo of desire. I can whisper my yearnings through the walls of this house. I can alter the way an image appears. But I can’t make Gert stay.