The Fisherman (13 page)

“But the man,” Rainer says.

“He’s made his choice,” Italo says. “It’s none of ours.”

Rainer isn’t happy, but he doesn’t try to go in, either. He manages to convince Italo that they need to find out who the man in the big house, the fisherman, is; though I get the impression that Italo would’ve been happy to walk away from that house and never give it a second thought. What they’re going to do once they discover who’s behind the night’s events, Rainer doesn’t say, not to Italo and not to Clara when she asks him a short time later, when he’s done relating the night’s events to her. Lottie and her sisters listen to their father’s story with a combination of wonder and terror as they prepare for their various days. When he’s finished, Gretchen stops loading her schoolbag and asks Rainer if this is like in the Gospels, the time Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. At that question, Clara flies into a rage, grabbing Gretchen with one hand and beating her about the head with the other, shouting, “How dare you? How dare you listen to your father and me?” Lottie and Christina are shocked. They’ve never seen their mother like this before, ever. Rainer leaps up and catches Clara’s hand, and the look she gives him says that, were she stronger, she’d do for him, too. “Let’s go, girls,” Rainer says, and the sisters are out of that house one-two-three.

VIII

It’ll take Rainer two days to learn the identity of the man in the big house. As it so happens, it’s actually Clara who figures it out. Late on the second afternoon after Helen’s return from the grave, Clara hears a trio of women at the bakery discussing the Dort estate and the queer character who inhabits it. Right on the spot, she knows she’s found what they’re looking for. She sidles up to the women, asking if they’re talking about one of the houses up in the mountains. “No, no,” the first woman says, “the Dort estate’s right here.” In about ten minutes, they sketch out for Clara what it’s taken me much longer to tell you. When Rainer walks in the front door later that night, he’s greeted by Clara, who says, “I know what you’re looking for.”

Really, it isn’t a moment too soon. In that same two days, things in the house next door have plummeted from bad to worse. Italo’s wife, you may recall, is looking after Helen and George’s children. About noon of that first day, Helen—or what was Helen—decides she wants those children back. How she knows where Italo has taken them, I can’t say, but know she does. She stands from her chair, leaves her husband where he’s still lying moaning on the floor, and sets out for Italo’s place. Those who see her making her way over to Italo’s say she doesn’t walk right. She moves the way you’d expect a person trying to use a pair of shattered legs and a broken spine would. And if that isn’t strange enough, the footprints she leaves are wet, as if she’s newly out of her bath and not bothered toweling off. She lurches her way to Italo’s, folks stopping when they see her and hurrying away in the opposite direction. She ignores them. When she reaches her destination, she stands in front of it, swaying from side to side, before stumbling forward and knocking on the door.

You have to give Italo’s wife, Regina, a lot of credit, because, although she sees Helen shuffling up the street toward her house, she hauls open the front door and stands there with her hands on her hips, facing this woman with the gold eyes. Regina’s an inch or two taller than her husband, whom she probably outweighs by a good twenty or thirty pounds, too. She isn’t stupid. She’s already sent the children, her own and Helen’s, into the back bedroom and told them not to open the door for love or money. (She’d kept them all home from school that day: Helen’s children because of the shock of the night before; her children to keep them company. Her views on education were flexible, you might say.) Regina doesn’t say a word to Helen. Later, she tells Italo and Rainer she was too afraid to speak. Why she opened the door in the first place, Regina wasn’t sure, but I think I know. Have you ever been so scared of something you move toward it, try to touch it, that kind of thing? It’s strange, isn’t it? I don’t know what the name for that reaction is, but I’m pretty sure it’s what drove Regina to confront this woman knocking on her door. Helen, the dead woman, the woman who was dead and isn’t any longer, is standing there on her ruined legs, looks at Regina, then looks at the room she’s guarding. She says, “The children.”

The sound of her voice is something awful. It’s hard, raspy, as if it hasn’t been used in a while, which I guess it hasn’t. It’s kind of liquidy, too, as if Helen’s speaking from underwater. There’s something else, a quality to the woman’s voice Regina will have a hard time putting her finger on when she relates Helen’s visit to her husband and his friend. She has an accent, Regina will say at last, but who doesn’t have an accent in this place? It’s not the accent the woman had when she was alive, no, not like what any of them has, moving from one tongue to another. This accent is what you’d imagine if an animal learned how to speak, something that wasn’t trying to master your particular language, but the idea of language itself. It’s not the way you’d think a dog or cat would speak, either. It’s the voice you’d give a lizard, or an eel. Although she’s the first to hear Helen speak—aside from George, presumably—she’s far from the last, and the consensus is that her description hits the nail right on the head. When she hears Helen, the hairs on the back of Regina’s neck stand straight up, and she has all she can do to keep where she is and shake her head no.

According to Regina, Helen doesn’t so much look at her as through her. Apparently she sees her shake her head, however, because she repeats her request, those same two words, “The children.” Regina repeats her answer, too, shaking her head so hard she’s afraid it might fly off.

It isn’t until Helen states her demand a third time, stepping closer to the door as she does, that Regina finally finds her voice. “They’re not yours anymore,” she says. “Go away.”

The woman doesn’t. Instead, she takes another, lurching step forward. Regina backs away, grabbing for the door with one hand. “Go away,” she says, “go back where you belong. Get back in the ground.”

When Helen makes to cross the threshold into the house, Regina swings the door shut. Not quite fast enough—before it’s shut, Helen thrusts her arm inside and starts grabbing at Regina, who, panicking, throws herself against the door, pushing with all her strength against the woman on the other side. The arm catches at her hair, her ear, and Regina slaps it away. Helen’s skin is stone cold, Regina will report, and damp. She pushes, and Helen pushes back, and the woman’s strength is terrible. If not for the fact that her body is full of broken bones, Helen would have the door open and those children in no time. Regina can hear the sound of the woman’s bones grinding against each other as she heaves herself against the door. Despite Regina’s best efforts—which I gather were nothing to sneeze at; she was a strong woman—Helen is slowly gaining on her, inching the door open. Sweat pouring down her forehead, Regina calls on God and the saints for help and, when none of them inclines to answer, lets loose every curse she knows in English and Italian on the woman. None of it makes any difference. If she’s thought to exorcise Helen by calling on the Almighty, it appears the woman isn’t afraid of him; if she’s thought to shock her by cursing, it appears Helen has heard worse. She continues pushing the door open, and Regina knows it isn’t going to be long until the muscles in her arms and legs, already trembling with the fight, give out. She screams her frustration, slapping away that cold, grasping hand, and that scream is what does the trick. It summons the children, her own and Helen’s, who pour out of the back room in a tide. Without stopping to figure out what’s what, they rush to the door and pile against it. Their strength isn’t much, but it’s enough. Now Regina is gaining, heaving the door shut. Helen flaps her arm at them, and the children, shrieking, scratch and claw it, one of them breaking her cold skin. Black blood—literally black blood—splatters the floor. The arm jerks back. The door slams shut. Regina’s oldest throws the bolt.

Now comes Helen’s turn to scream, and scream she does. Bad as her voice is, her scream is a thousand times worse. Like a devil burning in hell, is how Regina will describe it. Years later, I understand, each of the children will still be waking from nightmares of it. Regina braces herself against the door, ready for Helen to make another try at it. She doesn’t. While the echoes of her scream are ringing in everyone’s ears, she leans close to the door and whispers to Regina through it. Whatever she says is more than two words, yet the children either can’t hear or can’t understand her. They see the blood drain from Regina’s face. They see her squeeze her eyes closed and suck in her breath a little, as if she’s felt a pain. But they don’t know the reason for any of it. Helen waits around for a moment after delivering her message, as if she’s listening to its effect on Regina. The children hear her on the other side of the door, breathing heavily from her efforts. Maria, Helen’s oldest, will tell Lottie’s sister Gretchen that the breathing sounded like her grandfather’s in the months before his death, hoarse and harsh, and something else, wet, like the way you breathe when you’re congested. Slowly, Helen retreats from the door, shuffling back to what was her house and husband.

Regina tells no one except Italo about Helen’s message to her. When he returns from work later that day, she sends the kids out to play—she’s kept them inside and close around her since Helen’s appearance, and even when she tells them to go outside, she insists they not go far—and she and her husband have a long talk about the day’s events. One of the children—Italo and Regina’s son Giovanni—hangs close to the house to try to spy on his mom and dad’s conversation. Only natural, I suppose, given that Regina hasn’t explained any of what happened earlier, just given abundant hugs to him, his brothers and sister, and the other children, and told them all to pray the rosary. The next day, Giovanni will tell Christina, the youngest of the Schmidt girls, about what he overheard. At first, he says, his dad was furious, ready to storm right over to the dead woman’s house and put her back in the ground. He was on his way to do that very thing when his mom told him that the woman had whispered something to him. Her voice dropped as she told his dad what it was, and Giovanni couldn’t hear. Whatever her words, they stopped his dad in his tracks. “What?” he says and Regina answers, “You heard me.” “Impossible,” he says. “Not,” says she. There was a lot of back-and-forth. The boy reports that Italo kept asking Regina, Was she sure? and, How could this woman know such a thing? his voice becoming more uncertain and quavery with each repetition. In return, Regina’s voice gained strength as she said again and again that she didn’t know how this woman could know, though the damned and devils in hell were supposed to know all manner of secrets, weren’t they? But that yes, so far as she could tell right then and there, the woman was correct. In fact, it explained a number of things. By the conversation’s end, Italo was in tears, sobbing, “What are we going to do?” over and over; Regina saying she didn’t know, but that they still had a little bit of time. Understandably, young Giovanni was upset at listening to all this. When he took up his position to eavesdrop, he hadn’t bargained on listening in on his dad sobbing. Finally, he couldn’t stand it anymore, and ran inside to join his parents, weeping himself. For which consideration he received a clout upside the head from Regina for spying, and a teary embrace from Italo. He watched Regina tell Italo he must consult his German friend about this matter. He was an educated man, the German—more importantly, he struck Regina as owning a measure of wisdom, and wisdom was always a precious commodity, especially at a time like this. She thought the German stood a better chance than most of them of knowing what to do about this woman who should be lying in the ground but was up and walking around. Because dealt with she had to be. There was no arguing the matter. Still wiping the tears from his eyes, Italo agreed. He would talk to his friend.

Which is how, later the night of that same first day, Italo appears at the Schmidts’ door, calling on Rainer. When Rainer greets him and invites him in, Italo wastes no time in saying what he’s come to say: “This woman, your neighbor—the one who has left her grave—something must be done about her.” “What do you mean?” Rainer asks. “We have to kill her,” Italo says, “we have to put her back where she belongs.” While Rainer asks him what’s wrong, Clara sends Lottie, who’s still up reading, off to bed. She starts to complain, but the flash of her mother’s eyes tells her to do as she’s told. Once the door to her room is safely shut, Rainer repeats his question, “What’s wrong?” Italo summarizes the afternoon’s events, refusing only to repeat Helen’s message to Regina. “It doesn’t bear being spoken out loud,” he declares. He verifies, however, that what she whispered is true, a truth there’s no way she could have learned. “The woman,” he says, “is no longer human. You,” he points at Rainer, “have seen her eyes. What happened today leaves no room for doubt.” “What is she, then?” Clara asks. “I don’t know,” Italo says. “A devil? Something else? I work with stone. This is not my profession. I cannot say what she is, only what she is not. She is not human.”

He’s agitated. He’s come inside and accepted the glass of iced tea Clara sets on the kitchen table for him, but he sits perched on the edge of his chair as if ready to jump and flee the house at any moment, maybe to seek out the neighbor’s. He keeps running his hands through his hair, and rubbing them together when he isn’t. Lottie, who has opened her bedroom door ever-so-slightly during the last part of Italo’s conversation with her parents, thinks he looks as if the secret he’s keeping is eating him alive, chewing its way out from where he tried to cage it deep down inside himself. To Lottie’s surprise, her father appears to be agreeing with Italo. Although Rainer’s favorite quotation is that Shakespeare one, you know, about there being more things in heaven and earth, he is, as a rule, the family’s resident skeptic, champion of what he refers to as “clear thinking.” Now here he is, nodding to Italo’s wildest speculations, going along with the man’s assertions that the woman has to be done away with, that she’s no longer a creature of this earth. It’s not so much that Lottie herself disagrees with Italo’s assessment—she thinks there’s more truth than not to what he’s saying—so much as that she can’t believe her father isn’t arguing with his friend, offering rational alternatives to Italo’s wild speculations. The two men sit up like this until well after midnight, long after Clara goes off to bed, Italo swaying from side to side as fatigue overtakes him, Rainer with his hands clasped together, his gaze on the floor. When Italo has run down, Rainer sends him home with a promise that they’ll attend to what needs attending to. Rainer stands in the doorway watching his friend walk up the street, and Lottie, who’s kept awake at her spot at the bedroom door, opens it and walks into the kitchen. Without turning around, Rainer says, “How much did you hear, Lottie?” When Lottie protests that she’s just up for a glass of water, Rainer cuts her off. “You want to know how much of what Mr. Oliveri said is true,” he says, which is close enough to the actual question plaguing Lottie—“How much of it do you believe, Papa?”—for her to claim it as her own. Rainer faces her, and Lottie is shocked to see the look written on his features: fear, fear so intense it has him on the brink of tears, his lip trembling. “What is it, Papa?” Lottie asks, “What’s wrong?” But Rainer only shakes his head and says, “It’s time for bed.” So thrown is Lottie by that expression that she forgets to ask her father for the answer he promised, and hurries off to join her sisters in their bed.