The Ghost in the Glass House (15 page)

Clare hid a grudging smile of admiration. Tilda had never caught Clare in the glass house yet, but she hadn't given up.

“Come on,” Clare's mother said. She caught Clare's hand and led her back around to the hidden door.

When they reached the mossy flagstone, Clare's mother stared through the etched glass. “It's beautiful, isn't it?” she said.

Warily, Clare nodded.

Her mother took the leaf-handled key from her pocket and slotted it in the lock.

Clare lurched forward, swiping for the key. “What are you doing?” she cried.

Her mother looked down, startled. “We're just going to take a look inside.”

“But they don't use this house anymore,” Clare insisted. “Tilda said. Remember?”

Her mother dismissed Clare's protest with a wave. “Oh,” she said. “I talked with her about that when she gave me the key. Why in the world
wouldn't
they use a summer house this beautiful? She couldn't give me any good reason.”

Her mother turned the key. The door swung open.

Clare's mother took in everything there was to see with a sharp eye: the wing of the piano, the couch and chairs scattered on the overlapped rugs, the books at large between them. But the instant she stepped inside the glass house, a wave of vertigo washed over Clare. For the first time in her life, she knew something her mother didn't, not just a child's secret or a small detail, but a fact that changed everything. Clare had always had to sort her mother's various pronouncements, discard dramatics, filter for moods. But until now it had been her mother's voice that named the world and made a thing true. Clare had always been able to take refuge in the certainty that, when it mattered most, her mother would know what to do. But her mother couldn't know the answers here, because she couldn't see the truth.

“Well,” her mother said appraisingly. “I think this should do.”

A square of stationery dropped from the buffet to the floor. Clare scanned the limbs of the candelabra, the varnished wood, the rich carpet below. It was impossible to tell if the page had been blown by wind from the open door, or if it was one of Jack's tricks.

Her mother toed one of the books on the floor. “If they straighten this all up and light some candles, it might even pass for a Venetian palace,” she said. “We'll just have to make sure no one arrives until dusk.”

“Arrives?” Clare repeated.

Her mother slid her arm around Clare's waist. “We're going to have a party,” she said. “Everyone's been needling me all summer about why we didn't take a place on the coast. So I told them last night to come over and we'd show them.”

Clare took an anxious glance around the room for a reaction from Jack.

“I thought you'd be happy,” her mother said, a hint of uncertainty in her voice. “You seemed so fascinated by this place when we first came.”

“It's fine,” Clare hurried to say.

To her relief, her reply didn't fool her mother. She smoothed Clare's hair back ruefully. “You used to be so much easier to please,” she said, and kissed her.

E
VERY MORNING
, T
ILDA WAGED
a brief but futile war to put Clare's mother's room back into something approaching order. And every day, within five minutes of Tilda's departure, Clare's mother undid all Tilda's best efforts with a dexterity and inventiveness that hinted at the presence of an artist at work. Today, before she left the house for a luncheon, Clare's mother had thrown a peach silk robe over one of the rods that supported the room's crisp white curtains. Splayed out, the voluminous folds of fabric added a new layer of scrim to the window dressing, but also a sense of alarm: the fabric was so close to the color of her mother's skin that it gave the impression a human figure stood in the window. A dragon, embroidered in red thread, prowled the back of the robe, infuriated to find himself upside down and helpless.

Clare crossed by him gingerly, to the big wardrobes where her mother's things were hung. Below a knot of stockings, in the skirts of her mother's gowns, under an assortment of enamel cigarette cases and jewelry boxes, her fingers closed around the spine of a suede and paper photograph album.

She pulled it free gingerly, like an archaeologist extracting ancient treasure from the rubble. Then she carried it back to her own room, where she settled down cross-legged on the small rug by her window.

Clare hadn't held the album since her father's death. But she did have memories of it. When she was small, her mother had used it to tell her stories, like with any other picture book. But unlike other picture books, these stories changed with each telling. Sometimes the changes were small: a feather on a hat her mother remembered once as turquoise, once as red. Others posed more jarring contradictions: a pale-eyed young man, caught by the camera in the midst of a laugh, who had been killed by gas the first week he went to war, or perhaps just caught the flu. A lake that sometimes lay south of Chicago, and sometimes in northern Michigan. A girl who waved from a black horse in an apple orchard, and shifted from a friend to a stranger and back again, depending on who told the story: Clare's mother or her father. Her mother was the better storyteller. But her father's stories, Clare had recognized even then, had the strong advantage of being accurate.

In those days, she hadn't been able to fathom how her parents could prefer these small dark images to all the flash and color of actual life. Even her mother's wedding portrait, with its silver lace and perfect studio halo, couldn't compete with the flush that came up in her mother's face each time she began a new story.

Back then, the album had seemed lifeless.

Now it felt haunted.

Clare folded the soft suede cover back to reveal the first page: a snapshot of her father at the end of a dock, his face blurred by a smile.

To her surprise, her face broke into an answering smile.

She turned the page.

Her father grinned up from an Adirondack chair. Behind him, spikes of hollyhock jutted up like a rakish crown. He strutted along the ledge of a high stone balcony. He approached down a long lane, swinging a bunch of flowers wrapped in newspaper the way a ballplayer might bring his bat up to the plate.

Her mother appeared for the first time in the bow of a canoe. The sun overhead had been so bright that it ate up the horizon so her mother seemed to drift from the surface of the lake directly into the sky. After that, the pictures of her father and mother mingled. In one, her mother stood with her back against a tree. In the next, her father had climbed into its branches, his pale jacket in a heap on the grass below.

Clare had braced herself for sorrow, but she was powerless against the happiness that washed through her with each glimpse of him. She'd wanted to look at him with eyes wiser than a child's, but the sight of him turned her childlike again.

When she reached the end, she let the cover fall back into place. But it didn't blot the images out. Instead, they crowded together in her mind and came alive. And instead of satisfying her desire to speak with her father, they made it grow wild.

Clare closed her eyes.

She'd heard Bridget's mother insist again and again that to reach into the spirit world wasn't magic, but science. It was only simple conversation, with an advanced method of listening.

So with her eyes still closed, Clare let a single word glow and echo in her mind:
Daddy?
As her mind spoke, her lips parted, but no sound passed between them.

Someone came into the room.

Clare knew without a doubt that the person who had joined her was not her father, just as she knew without a doubt that she was not alone. Immediately, her eyes sprang open.

Nothing in the room had changed. Even the clouds seemed to be frozen to the sky. But the sense that she was not alone didn't fade. Instead, it grew stronger.

“Hello?” she said aloud.

A surge of love swept over her, so strong it was difficult to catch her breath. With it came the sense she got from Tilda's sharp looks, that she'd been recognized for who she was, and not the pose she'd chosen. But this feeling went even deeper: that whoever had joined her knew everything she'd ever done, things her own father couldn't know, things even she had forgotten.

But she didn't know a thing about it.

The terror of this brought her to her feet. She left the album askew on the floor, darted into the hall, and pulled the door shut.

But the presence was just as strong on this side of the door as it had been in her room. It didn't fade when she rattled down the stairs, or when she burst from the front hall onto the porch, or fled the porch for the lawn.

It wasn't until she stopped in the shade of the front oaks, her breath ragged, that the presence receded. But she didn't have any sense that she'd outrun it. Instead, it seemed to have left her. And when it did, she felt a new kind of loneliness, for something she couldn't name, like the feeling from a dream erased by waking, with her sore heart the only proof. She gazed around the yard, half hoping the presence would return.

When it didn't, she headed over the lawn, toward the glass house. But when she rounded the corner, its door stood open, propped with a garden hoe. Half its contents had been spread under the maples, where Mack wandered through the empty chairs and couches with a strange blend of tenderness and suspicion, as if he were the only living guest at a party for ghosts.

T
HE SPIRITIST LAUGHED
.

“Well, you know,” he told Clare's mother, as the nearby guests looked on from their mismatched armchairs and divans. “It's very unusual to find a presence out of doors.”

Clare glanced at the glass house. One object of the party had been to show off its weird charm, but by the time the guests had arrived at dusk, the glass hulk with the candlelight leaking out between the vines had taken on the aspect of a giant coal burning up from the inside. The few guests who had ventured through the shadows to the half-hidden door had found a dim, empty room whose walls seemed to be made from slabs of night. Almost no one who dared to make a circuit of the house ventured inside, and the few who did hurried out again to rejoin the party, which had collected on the furniture Mack had scattered under the maple canopy, between comforting strings of electric lights.

Bridget's mother sat beside her spiritist on a leather settee. Bridget's father sat opposite them on the sea-foam divan. Clare's mother sat at the foot of the divan, separated from him by a respectable length of cushion. Clare stood just outside the circle, in the shadow of the glass house.

“Oh,” Clare's mother said, with extravagant disappointment. “But I was sure you would find us a ghost tonight. None of us have seen anyone but each other since May. We're all so bored we could spit. You're sure there's absolutely
no one
out here?”

Bridget's father and mother hadn't exchanged a word all night, but they both turned to Clare's mother at this. Bridget's mother scanned her face with the sharp eye of a true believer grown suspicious of praise through long years of ridicule. Bridget's father glanced at her with the sudden unease of a doctor who has just discovered a warning symptom in a patient he'd believed to be healthy.

Clare's mother kept her gaze fixed on the spiritist, a young man whose remarkably fine suit was strangely at odds with his eyes, which were bold but wary, like a street child's. The instinct to maintain his dignity struggled on his features with a showman's desire to please. Around the gathering, the conversation dwindled as guests turned to observe.

“I'm sure,” Clare's mother prompted him with disarming confidence, “if there
was
anything here, you could feel it.”

“Well, of course,” the spiritist agreed.

Clare's mother leaned forward with an eagerness that almost disguised the malice in her eyes.

“Would you try?” she asked.

Bridget's mother tried to give the spiritist a warning glance, but by now he was in Clare's mother's grasp.

He continued to protest, but only for show. “I'm not sure everyone would be interested in—”

“Nonsense,” Clare's mother interrupted. “What could be more interesting than eternity?”

The entire party had gathered around them now, with two exceptions. Bridget stared stonily at the sky, her legs draped over the side of one of the red wing chairs in a stand of furniture the other guests had abandoned as they gravitated toward the spiritist. Nearby, Teddy took advantage of the distraction to add the contents of his pocket flask to a glass of Tilda's mint lemonade.

Amanda Bradburn, a doe-eyed girl with a wide mouth and a nervous laugh who had joined them at the seaside that summer after an ignominious stint at a finishing school in Philadelphia, swept into the open seat between Clare's mother and Bridget's father. She gave Clare's mother a look of open derision as she arranged the filmy layers of her dress, then settled back against the divan.

Clare scanned the faces of the other guests to see if any of them had taken in this broad commentary on the friendship between her mother and Bridget's father. She caught Bram's figure on the far side of the circle, his back to the hill. His eyes met hers. Beside Bram, Denby caught the motion. He searched the gathering, his gaze alert, but didn't settle on any face.

“Shall we get you anything?” Clare's mother asked. “A candle? Or a bell?”

The spiritist set one hand on each knee and gave his head a curt shake.

“He is the instrument himself,” Bridget's mother explained, in a tone of scientific rebuke.

“Forgive me,” Clare's mother said. But by now the drama was unfolding without her help. The spiritist closed his eyes. Clare's mother leaned back to watch.

Unseen fingers threaded through Clare's. She started. From across the crowd, she could feel Bram's eyes on her.