The Ghost Orchid (34 page)

“And what did you find?” I ask more gently.

“There were pins all over the floor and pieces of broken china,” she says. “I picked them up.” She takes a few pieces of broken china from a different pocket and places them on the table. I spy a
T
and an
A.

“Tam’s cup,” I say.

“And where were you when your niece was invading my room?” Bethesda asks Diana.

“I was having a cup of tea in the kitchen,” she says, “when the cup I was drinking from exploded in my hand. It cut my finger. See?” Diana holds up her bandaged hand.

“Do you have the pieces of that cup?” I ask.

Diana looks at me as if I’m crazy. “Why in the world would I save—” But before she can finish, I’ve noticed that a sliver of china, shaped something like an arrowhead, is clinging to Diana’s cardigan. I reach across Nat and pluck it from her sweater. Turning it over, I see the letter
J
written in loopy blue script. When I put it down on the table, the other shards begin to tremble.

“Shit,” Nat says. “Who’s doing that?”

“Shh,” Bethesda hisses. “Be quiet!”

The shards begin to move until they’ve formed a circle around the base of the candelabra and then stop. The letters have arranged themselves to spell a word.
Jacynta.

“It’s all the children,” Bethesda says, her voice hushed with awe, “turned into one spirit.”

“Great,” Nat says, his eyes wide. “So what are we supposed to do now?”

“I think we’re supposed to have a séance,” Daria says. “I think that’s what the children want.”

Everyone looks to me and I shake my head. “I can’t—” I begin, but then I hear Zalman draw another painful breath and I realize that I have to do something to break the spell he’s under.

Nat turns to me. “It’s like you were saying to me on the way up the hill. You’re going to keep spewing out the bad stuff until you turn around and face it. You have to do this as much for yourself as for Zalman.”

I could remind Nat that he called what I said on the hill psychobabble, but I don’t. “I’m not even sure what to do first.”

“Well, duh,” Daria says, rolling her eyes. “We start by joining hands.”

Nat reaches out his hand to take mine, and I feel as if he’s reaching across a void. But when I put my hand in his hand, it’s warm and I feel the distance between us contract.

When I take Zalman’s hand, though, it’s alarmingly cold. “Poor Zalman,” I say. “It doesn’t seem fair that he’s had to bear the brunt of this.”

“He’s the
genius loci,
” Daria says, causing everyone at the table to stare at her. “I looked it up,” she says defensively. “It means the pervasive spirit of the place. So of course he feels everything that’s happened here more than the rest of us.”

“She’s right,” David says, taking Bethesda’s hand. “Remember what he said that night in the library about how he felt as though there was a voice speaking through him?” He reaches out to take Diana Tate’s hand, but the director stands up abruptly, pushing back her chair. “I don’t think I should be part of this,” she says. “I’m not a guest here.”

“It’s your grandmother’s bones lying in the crypt below the garden,” David says, still holding out his hand to her. “You’re as much, or more, a part of this than any of us.”

“That’s right, Aunt Diana,” Daria says. “Haven’t you ever wondered why our whole family is so screwed up? It’s like there’s a family curse. Maybe this will set things straight.”

Diana lets out an exasperated sigh, but sits back down and takes David’s and Bethesda’s hands. “There’s no family curse,” she mutters under her breath. “Your mother’s an alcoholic and I’ve always been the one to keep things together. To clean up after her messes.”

I see that Daria’s blinking back tears again. “That’s enough,” I say, surprised at how forceful I sound. “Everyone be quiet. We have to focus.”

A gratifying hush follows, but my confidence quickly seeps away. What the hell am I supposed to do now? I wish more than anything that Mira were here. I close my eyes, trying to remember the séance Mira held the evening of the day we’d gone to the bog looking for the white orchid. Mira had said that I was ready, that we had to confront the spirit of the child I’d seen in the bog, but instead the spirit confronted me. Will I see it again? I take a deep breath to calm my steadily rising panic, constricting my throat muscles to slow the breath the way Mira taught me. When I inhale I smell the vanilla scent of the orchid and think maybe that’s what was missing the first time. If we’d found the orchid in the bog, maybe things would have been different.

“We’ve made a circle to welcome you,” I say, not sure where the words have come from. “No one need be left out. We’re ready to listen to your story.”

A cold current moves through the air, carrying with it particles of ice, the peaty smell of Diana’s scotch, and the fragrance of vanilla. I open my eyes and see that the air is sparkling with ice crystals borne upward in a spiral eddy, like moths circling the candles. Then the air suddenly goes dead and the crystals float down over our heads, catching on hair and eyelashes, settling over our hands, and dimming the candlelight.

“It’s so cold,” someone says.

I look around to see where the voice—a girl’s voice, but not one that matches those of the women at the table—came from. In the diminished light of the candles I think that I see Bethesda’s lips moving, but I’m not sure.

“It’s so cold in the well,” another voice says. It seems to be coming from David, but the voice is much too young to be his.

“And too quiet.”

This time I know for sure that it’s Nat who’s spoken, but when I turn to him, I see that a film has settled over his eyes, like a glaze of ice, and the voice is not his. It’s a boy’s voice, older than the first one and more clipped and confident, but still nothing like Nat’s.

“James,” I say, “is that you?”

“Who wants to know?” comes the voice, sarcastic and brusque but with a little waver at the end that gives away the falseness of his bravado. I can almost see him—a pixie face, brown from running outdoors, long, gawky legs and arms. He was thirteen when he died.

“El—” I start to give the name I’ve gone by since I published my first story, but then I change my mind and give the name I was born with. “Elmira,” I say.

There’s a flurry of voices around the table, hurried whispers that I can’t quite make out or identify the source of. I think I see Nat’s lips moving, and Bethesda’s and David’s. Diana’s lips are pursed, but the only sound coming from her is a long, low hiss.

“James,” I say, turning to Nat. “You can speak for the others. Tell us what happened.”

“I
would,
” he says, his boy’s voice petulant, “but
she
won’t let us.” He cuts his eyes—no longer Nat’s eyes—over toward Diana Tate. “
She
makes us be quiet. When we were sick,” he says, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “she only took care of
Alice.
” He nearly spits the name.

“ ‘Drink the tea your mother’s made for you’, she said,” the girl’s voice says, and then the younger boy’s, echoing, “ ‘Drink your tea. Drink your tea.’ ” More voices join in, merging and overlapping, a dozen voices, more voices than there are mouths to speak at the table, building to a crescendo that shakes the table, rattling the broken china. Like dry bones rattling. What am I supposed to do now that I’ve summoned these unruly spirits? Everyone else at the table has slipped beneath the same glassy film—except, I suddenly notice, Daria.

“One at a time,” Daria says, with the authority of a veteran camp counselor. “We can only understand you if you speak one at a time. And you,” Daria says, turning to her aunt, “let them speak. You’re not in charge here anymore.”

Diana hisses and spits out a few words in a language I can’t identify, but then she’s quiet. The only words spoken in the room are Zalman’s half-audible sonnet lines, fragments of which I catch in between the sounds of the wind flinging snow at the windows. “. . . the eloquence of water . . . while strolling past a sigh . . . a soothing blood for ancient bones . . .”

I realize that Zalman is now reciting all the sonnets he’s written here at Bosco. This disconcerts me more than the broken teacups and disembodied voices and Diana speaking in tongues—that Zalman’s beautifully ordered poems have gotten scrambled together in a chaotic maelstrom. But then, in a lull of the wind, I’m able to catch two of the lines together, then three, then four, and I realize that Zalman is somehow composing a new sonnet, made up of lines or parts of lines from all the sonnets he’s written at Bosco, which he recites now in a hoarse whisper.

“And yet one hears, while strolling past, the sighs

of red-winged blackbirds swifter than starlight;

no one has ever heard such ghostly cries;

among them from a soul that never dies,

a flash of wing by day, black ghost by night;

a spirit, barely in your mortal sight,

the spirit of an infant lost at birth

in tragedy as old as heat and light.

Her loss is marked in red, just as the earth,

so silently its pulse beats without sound,

in honor of Egeria’s sad day,

will redden rivers with the blood of birth,

its source forever hidden underground.

Such mysteries the earth secretes away!”

“ ‘Such mysteries the earth secretes away,’ ” I repeat. “Something in the well? But all we found were Wanda’s bones. What else is there?”

“She’s trapped there with us,” Bethesda says in Cynthia’s voice.

“Like a bird trapped in a net,” Tam’s voice comes from David, just slightly out of sync with the movement of his lips.

“We can’t be free until she is,” James concludes, turning Nat’s blank eyes toward me. Under the milky film I see a remnant of Nat looking out at me, and I realize that his freedom is also at stake.

“Who?” I ask.

The three faces, David, Nat, and Bethesda, instantly turn their ice-glazed eyes on me.

I feel a wave of cold pass over me as if a mantle of ice had settled over my shoulders. I feel it wrapping around me, tight as a winding sheet. I can see from Daria’s frightened expression that something’s happening to me. I’m changing: the film that had settled over the others is falling over me . . . and then the icy cloak falls over my eyes.

It’s just like at my first séance. I can feel myself being pulled down, the ground beneath me giving way. The bog, hungry for another sacrifice, is swallowing me up whole. And as I rush downward what rises to greet me is the face of the baby, its lips pursed to suck, its blue eyes open.

I open my eyes to banish the image and see that I’m surrounded by green. I’m standing under the tamarack tree in the bog, only it’s summer, the ground at my feet carpeted by the emerald green sphagnum moss, the air full of darting dragonflies, like jewels that have come to life. Brighter than the dragonflies, though, are the eyes of the man standing next to me. A man with dark hair and blue-green eyes that I know I’ve seen before. He’s looking at me as if he were trying to hold me upright with the force of his gaze—a look so full of love that it has the opposite effect and makes me feel weak.

“I can see you in her, Tom,” I hear myself say. Tom. The man in front of me—the man who loves me this much—is Tom Quinn. No, it’s not me he loves, it’s Corinth Blackwell.

“See?” he asks. “You can see her now?” His gaze travels over the surface of the pond as if looking for someone. I follow his gaze and see something move on the other side of the water, but whatever it is is hidden by a patch of fog. A bird is startled from its hiding place among the sedges, and I see Tom watch it fly across the water; I feel Corinth watch it, too, but I keep my eyes on the opposite bank and see, when the fog burns off in the morning sun, a dark-eyed girl crouched behind the sedges. Alice.

As I turn back to Tom I feel something pulling at my feet from beneath the quaking ground. Like quicksand. I hear the sound of wings over my head as the blackbird alights in the tamarack tree, but I can also hear the sibilant hiss that came from Diana at the séance, pulling me back to Bosco, back to the well beneath the garden. That’s what the children meant. Corinth’s spirit was pulled back into the well at Bosco before she could tell Tom . . .

I reach out as I fall and grasp Tom’s hand. I can see, just over his shoulder, the tamarack tree, where Alice’s name was wedged into the knothole, but instead of the blue and white china plaque, I see a name carved in the bark.

Elmira.

Just as in Nat’s story, I’ve found my own name. And as if I were hearing my name called, I feel it pulling me back to the library at Bosco, just as Corinth is being pulled down into the well with Wanda and the children and, most frightening of all, that small, dead infant that was left here in the bog. I’m out of time . . .

“She’s yours,” I say as I sink to the ground, squeezing Tom’s hand to keep myself inside Corinth’s body for one last moment. I feel an answering squeeze that for one moment is both Tom’s hand and Nat’s back in the library at Bosco. “Alice is your child, Tom.” I look across the water and I see Alice. She’s listening, too. I’m telling all this to her as well. “Take her to my sister, Elmira,” I say, not sure who’s talking now, me or Corinth. Then I look up at Tom. “And stay with them,” I tell him. “You’re all she has now.”

There’s so much more to say, but I feel myself rushing out of Corinth’s body, not down into the ground, but up. The last thing I hear before the darkness falls is the sound of wings beating the air around me.