The Ghost in the Glass House (19 page)

“She sat with him for three days running. But the third night she fell asleep. When she woke up he was gone. We never thought he could have gotten all the way to the glass house. He could barely stand without help. Mack only found him when the sun came up. By then it was too late.”

When Clare turned the silvered glass, the image inverted. The boy's eyes disappeared and his hair turned black. She touched the pearl at her neck. “This was hers,” she said.

Tilda nodded.

“Where did they go?” Clare asked.

“He took her away that same year,” Tilda told her. “She died of flu during the war. He had a stroke a year ago. But his nephew kept us on to run the place.”

Clare lifted the little case. “How did you know he was still there?”

“I heard the music through the glass,” Tilda said. She glanced out over the garden. “I didn't like the idea of him out there all alone. And he was company for me.”

Her eyes met Clare's. “I never understood why he stayed.”

“He's afraid to go to heaven,” Clare told her.

Tilda nodded as if this was a familiar disease.

“But it's heaven,” Clare insisted.

Tilda raised her eyebrows, giving Clare the point. “But to go there,” she said, “we have to leave everything we know. You spend your whole life learning to live in this world, and then this world is gone.”

She began to collect the loose papers and photographs from the quilt. As she did, Clare picked up a grainy snapshot.

“It's Mack,” she said.

He was so young in the picture that it had taken her a minute to place him, but he wore one of the same work shirts she'd seen him in all summer long. He held a flowering plant up for the camera, its roots cradled in his palms, which were black with soil.

Tilda retrieved the photograph and deposited it in the hatbox. “Not anymore,” she said, and dropped a sheaf of papers on it.

“You love him,” Clare said, reckless from all the other secrets they'd shared.

“Of course I do,” Tilda retorted. “No one was ever kind to me like Mack. From the day I came here, he never let me carry a stick of firewood in. Before that, I can't remember a day I didn't. He'd bring me feathers and pretty rocks he found in the yard. When his mother died, no one else could make her whiskey cake. So I kept trying until he said mine was good as hers.

“He asked me to make it when he married Addie,” she added. “That was the first I heard about that.”

“I'm sorry,” Clare said.

Tilda let the lid settle over the scraps in the box. “None of us ever get all the things we want,” she said. Her eyes met Clare's, full of a light of triumph Clare had only caught there in glimpses before. “But we can keep anything we want in our own heart.”

Clare held out the silver plate, but Tilda shook her head. “That's yours,” she said.

Clare let the velvet cover fall over the glass and fastened the album's sickle hook. “What was his name?” she asked.

“Nathaniel,” Tilda answered.

Clare held out her hand. “I need the key,” she said.

Tilda pulled it from her pocket.

A
FILM OF GOLD DROPPED
over Clare's face when she stepped into the glass house. Jack's lips pressed hers through the thin fabric.

Then the sheer veil rose and described a long, celebratory arc before it dropped into a gold puddle suspended in Jack's invisible hand.

“I got it last night,” Jack crowed. He poured the scarf in a waterfall of silk from one unseen hand to the other. “I thought you'd like it, so I caught it when she sat down at the piano, and when she got up—” He trailed off. “What's wrong?” he asked.

“I'm going home,” Clare said. Despite the tears that stood in her eyes, a smile twisted her lips.

“That's good,” Jack said, his tone alert but bewildered. “It's where you wanted to go.”

Clare nodded.

“Then why are you crying?” he asked.

“I can't stay,” she told him. “You can't come.”

Jack's lips met one of her tears and smeared it in a broad stripe across her cheek.

“I brought you something,” Clare said. She pulled the leather case from her pocket. But when she tried to hand it to Jack, it lurched in his grasp.

“It's heavy,” he said.

“Here,” said Clare. She took her seat on the divan, laid the case down, and undid the clasp.

The tooled cover seemed to rise under its own power, slowly but steadily, until it stood perpendicular to the plate. Then it fell open. The boy's image stared up at them, half mirror, half shadow.

“What is it?” Jack asked.

“You,” she said.

The case twitched and skidded on the old upholstery. “He's so thin,” Jack said.

Each time the case jerked, the image inverted. The boy's face slipped into shadow, flared up, disappeared again.

“He looks like he might be brave,” Jack added.

Clare reached, found his sleeve, and followed it to his hand.

“Where did you get it?” he asked.

“Tilda,” Clare said. “She remembers you.”

Jack's finger traced an infinite loop on the back of her hand.

“Are my parents—” he began.

“They're gone,” Clare told him. “I'm sorry.”

The worked leather cover of the case rose from the divan again. It fell over the image and blotted it out.

“Did she tell you my name?” he asked.

“Nathaniel.”

Jack's hand went still on her own.

“Don't you like it?” she asked.

“It's a good name,” Jack said, but the disappointment in his voice was unmistakable.

“Is it the picture?” Clare asked, and bumped the leather case with her knuckle. “I like it.”

Jack's finger followed the arch of her brow to her temple, found the valley below her eye, and dropped down the slope of her cheek to her lips. Then he raised her chin and kissed her.

“What's the matter?” she whispered.

Jack turned the case on the green upholstery. “I thought it would tell us something.”

“It did,” Clare said. “We know your name. We can see your face.”

“But what does that tell us,” Jack asked, “that we didn't know before?”

Clare had wondered this same thing the day she met him. And she didn't have any better answer now than she did then.

Jack rose from the couch. “Maybe it doesn't matter,” he said, and began to pace. “Maybe that's why I forgot.”

“But you know now,” Clare said.

“What if I forget again?”

A chill ran over Clare. “Do you think you'll forget everything?”

“I don't know,” Jack said.

Clare looked up the hill at the garden that was lost in mist to Jack.

“Listen,” she said. “The ghost in the mist.”

Jack sat back down beside her and took her hand.

“I think it might haunt the whole world,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“It's in the house, too,” she told him. “And the garden. And at the shore.”

Jack's hand went still in hers. “How do you know?”

“I can feel it too,” she told him.

“What did it do to you?” he demanded.

The other ghost had come for her when she called, and stayed with her in the dark. “It helped me,” she said.

“Were you afraid?”

“Yes.”

Something brushed her lips, landed between the bones at the base of her neck, took flight again.

“If I go up the hill,” Jack said, “will you go with me?”

Clare nodded. “When?”

Jack was already on his feet, pulling her along with him.

His hand stayed firm in hers as they crossed through the glade and for the first steps beyond. Then, as they gained the hill, his touch began to fade.

“Jack?” she asked.

“I'm right here,” he said.

A step later, he was gone.

Clare stopped in the early sun halfway up the hill. For a few breaths, she waited for him to turn back and find her again. Then a strange certainty settled over her: not just that Jack was gone, but that she was not alone.

She ran the rest of the way up the hill, toward the garden and sky reflected in the kitchen glass, which changed all the familiar shapes and made them shine so bright that they seemed like windows into another world.

 

C
AREY
W
ALLACE
was raised in small towns in Michigan. She is the author of
The Blind Contessa's New Machine
, and lives and works in Brooklyn. Visit her at
www.careywallace.com
.