The Hawley Book of the Dead (10 page)

I rose from my solitary bed, but I kept hearing the voice:
“I’ll have you yet.”
The phrase echoed in my head. It troubled me. I knew it from somewhere. I went to the drawer that held Jeremy’s shirt, wrapped it around me, and slept soundly.

Caleigh felt feverish and infinitely thirsty, like she could drink an ocean. She thought about getting up, getting a drink, maybe going to tell her mother of her dream, but her muscles were limp as overcooked spaghetti. To comfort herself, she wove the “Missing Dad” pattern, and there he was, sitting on a rock by the ocean near their house in Ireland. She wanted him to hold her, pet her hair as he always used to do, tell her, “Poor, poor. Poor Caleigh,” until she felt better. But she couldn’t
get to him. She could only watch while he looked out at the ocean. Even just seeing him comforted her, though, and soon she fell into a second deep sleep. By morning, she’d forgotten all about her adventures in the night. Her dreams had faded as dreams tend to do, until darkness falls again.

We spent the next week getting settled. The twins fussed over their
rooms, painting walls and rearranging their furniture and clothing. Caleigh read and ate
apples from the trees out in the yard, crunching and turning pages loudly while we all
worked. My mom, dad, and Nathan had all been enjoined into domestic service, and every
day they helped me scrub floors, knock down cobwebs, load hay into the barn. The heat
persisted, the air thick and hazy. Sweat pearled on our skin at the least exertion. But
the morning of the fair dawned cooler, and with that jewel-edged clarity October days
have only in New England.

I made myself coffee and poured it into a thick mug to take up to my
office. I gazed out the French doors at the sun, listened to the birdsong. The heat
hadn’t stopped the transformation of the foliage. We were poised at the turn of
the season. The winds and sleet and cold could come any time, but that day the glow of
the trees was still like palpable light. Scarlet and salmon, and fleshy gold-veined
green they shone, although soon enough the leaves would fall and dry and blow away,
leaving only skeletal branches reaching like bones into the sky.

But that day was golden, like the David Bowie song we danced to at our
wedding, the one Jeremy used to sing to me. Our first time away together had been to
London, to visit his parents. We’d seen Bowie’s
Sound + Vision
concert at the Docklands. “Golden Years” was Jeremy’s favorite
song. He’d often pop up and startle me, croon it tunelessly in my ear. One of his
little jokes I told myself I’d never miss. And now I was crying in my coffee,
wishing I could hear him sing it one more time.

I had a flash of memory. It was a Monday, our very last
Monday together. The one day of the week completely devoted to smoothing out kinks in
our current show and developing new tricks for the next we were planning. The theater
was dark Monday nights, and Jeremy and I often stayed late at the workshop, got takeout.
It was also one of the only times we could be completely alone.

I was in my office, puzzling over an awkward transition in the
Mascherari
script when I heard Dan call, “See you tomorrow,”
and the big overhead door slam and lock. I pushed back my chair and began working the
knots out of my neck. Then I felt Jeremy’s hands grip my shoulders, gently
coaxing my muscles. “
That
feels good.”

“How about this?” He breathed the question into my ear as he
slid his hands down the length of me, to rest at my waist. He kissed me then, just at
the base of my collarbone. I could smell the oniony scent of flash powder on him. It was
like an aphrodisiac to me, that smell. I took his face in my hands, kissed him deep. I
loved the view of his known face when I kissed him, its planes and arcs. I never closed
my eyes, but always looked into his, elementally blue as sky or water. He pulled me to
him, carried me to the couch I kept there for those late nights. Jeremy wasn’t
tall, but he had the kind of strength that came from using his whole body for his work,
the strength acrobats or jockeys have.

His hands, clever from card and coin tricks, unbuttoned me as he went.
“It’s a minor miracle to me that you are still a featherweight after three
children, Mrs. Maskelyne.” I laughed. When his mouth settled on my breast, his
hand slipped into the wetness between my legs. My laugh turned to a hum of pleasure at
the magic our bodies always seemed to find together.

My hands reached for him and hit glass. The old window didn’t
shatter, in spite of its bubbles and fissures, but there I was, back in Hawley. A glaze
of tears shone on my face reflected in the window, and I felt the sting of freshened
pain, the wound Jeremy’s death made opening again.

But then I heard Caleigh’s heavy feet pounding the stairs. I
steeled myself to go and make breakfast. By the time I’d wiped my eyes and got
down to the kitchen, Caleigh was slamming cabinet doors, complaining in the whiny little
girl voice I was trying to break her of.

“Why can’t we get some
fun
cereal?”

“Because it’s full of sugar, and you’re ready to jump
out of your skin now. How about scrambled eggs?”

“With cheese?”

“You know it.” I felt another stab of grief as I remembered
the last meal Jeremy ever made for her, Caleigh’s green eggs and ham. She never
asked for it now. Maybe someday she’d make it for her own children, tell them how
her father had invented it for her. I hoped so. There were so many lasts, and I
couldn’t help but replay them all, my mind stuck on rewind. I knew it was the
same for the girls. We all carried him with us in different ways, the loss still so
fresh we hadn’t found any ease in bearing it.

I started assembling pans and ingredients, pushing aside my brooding
thoughts while Caleigh formed and re-formed patterns with her string.

“I wish we could have breakfast at the fair. I bet they have good
doughnuts.”

“I bet they do. But we’re not meeting Grand and Gramps there
until eleven.”

“We could go early.”

“We could, but then we’d be there for hours and
hours.”

“That would be great. Hey, will Gramps take us for a ride in the
cool car?” My father’s not-quite retirement from the Williams College
faculty had freed up enough time for him to restore an ancient Packard convertible. All
the girls loved it. I could see the wheels of the car Caleigh was shaping in string.

“I bet he will.”

She tucked into her eggs, and after she finished, she threw herself into
my lap. She was dressed in her favorite bright green Hello Kitty T-shirt and a plaid
skirt. At least we’d be able to find her in a crowd.

“Mom, I’ve been having some weird dreams. Well, not really
dreams. More like, I don’t know … like something that
happened a long time ago, and I can see it.”

A thin shiver ran through me. The strange dreams I’d been having
over the past week shuffled around in my mind like a pack of cards. “Well, do
they upset you?”

“Not really. They just seem so real.”

“What happens in the dreams?”

“A girl is there, in long dresses. Her mom, too, sometimes. Or her
grandmother. They do stuff. Cook things, or clean. And there’s a book—a
book the girl has but she doesn’t really want it.”

The book with red leather covers pursued me in my dreams, too. Sometimes
I’d be trying to perform the trick called Book of Life, sometimes I dreamed of a
woman who was supposed to keep the book safe. The woman would shift and change;
sometimes she would be the woman in the painting, but often others would take her place.
An old woman, or a woman with red hair like my own. Many of the dreams would begin with
the ever-changing woman writing in the book with a quill pen. Then she’d startle
at a noise, close the book up, run to hide it. Some nights she buried it in the earth.
Some nights she hid it behind a loose brick in a wall. But the next night, it would
appear again.

Caleigh looked up at me, searched my face, as if she knew about my dreams
that echoed hers. “And Mom? The girl has your name.”

I held her tighter, kissed her cheek. Wondered what it meant, that the
Revelations were in our dreams. I felt them close, surrounding us in this house. The
woman in the painting might have been a Revelation, for all I knew. Was some kind of
relation, probably. It still troubled me that I hadn’t remembered seeing it the
first time I went through the house, with Carl Streeter. I’d thought about
calling him to ask if the painting had always been there. But he’d think I was a
nut-cake.

“Well, sweetheart, your dreams may be flashes of what happened
here, many years ago. You know your string games are a kind of magic you can do, and
divining things that happened in the past could be another part of your
gift.”

“Yeah, sometimes it starts when I’m making a pattern. Or
when I’m reading.”

“I don’t think it’s anything to worry about at
all.”

“So it’s not weird?”

“No, I don’t think it’s weird. But you know,
sometimes it’s good to write down your dreams. Then they don’t bother you
as much. Can you do that?”

“I guess I can.” She paused, then said,
“Daddy helps, too. I see him, Mom, when I make the ‘Missing Dad’
pattern.” I hugged her close, breathing in her fresh, milky smell. She pinched
the skin of my knuckle. It amused her that it stayed in a ridge, didn’t snap
right back like hers. Her face had lost its troubled look. “
Now
can I go
wake up Grace and Fai?” One of Caleigh’s favorite pastimes was leaping
onto her sisters’ beds and bouncing them until they got up.

“Sweetheart, we don’t have to leave for a while yet. Let
them sleep. If you don’t they’ll be cranky. Then none of us will be
pleased with you, you know.”

“Oh, all right,” Caleigh sighed. “But what will I
do
?”

“Last I knew Nathan was outside. You could go and bother
him.”

“I think I’ll just read.” She slid off my lap,
plucked an oatmeal cookie from the jar, then darted out, the door banging behind
her.

I crumbled uneaten toast between my fingers, wondered what our twinned
Revelation dreams meant. Although I felt better behind my high fence, I didn’t
want to risk the lives of my children on it alone, or on my own unconfirmed feelings of
safety, or old family legends. We sure hadn’t been safe in Las Vegas. But would
we be any safer in Hawley? I had fled in desperation, but I’d had a lot of time
to think in the past week while washing old panes of mottled glass and hacking at weeds.
I realized that there were just too many unanswered questions. Why had Nan been so
adamant we come here to Five Corners? And how had she known about the Fetch? Before I
even had much of a clue myself, she had
known
.

I’d taken the girls to visit her just after we’d arrived,
but she’d kept us busy, made sure we were all swirled up with her hawks and
helping the girls fly them. Tiny and implacable, she’d commanded and coaxed the
girls all morning, her long silver braid swinging as she gestured at them. When
she’d gone in the house to supervise snacks, I followed her, caught her in the
hall, asked her what she meant when she sent the note.

“An old woman’s fancy, maybe … no need
to dissect it, Reve. You’re here now and that’s what matters.”

“But why were you so insistent? And how did you know about the
Fetch? Our Fetch? I never told anyone.” I took hold of her bird-wing arm,
thin as a stick. Nan tisked at me, just as one of her birds might,
and shook me off. She was shrunken with age now, but still strong with ropy muscle from
handling hawks and cleaning mews every day of her long life.

“Don’t look for more trouble, Revelation,” she told
me. “You have enough.” And she strode into the kitchen, commanding her
housekeeper to hurry with lunch.

The connection of the distant past with what was happening now had been
tugging at the periphery of my consciousness, and my dreams kept stirring it all up
again. And now Caleigh’s. I sighed, yanked my hair back until my scalp hurt,
determined to pull all the weirdness out of my brain.

Miss May, our goat, bleated desultorily just outside the kitchen door and
brought me back to the present. She was missing the horses. As soon as I knew where we
were bound for, I’d had them shipped to a farm in Vermont. Even before I had any
idea how I would get my family away. The horses had been bred and raised in the West,
with its dearth of trees, and I knew they’d need time to get used to the heavy
foliage of New England, the shadows it cast, the drifts of leaves. Even a well-trained
horse will spook at things it’s unaccustomed to. It would have been stupid to
uproot us all to ensure the safety of my children, then let the twins crack their heads
open in a needless fall. It was a risk to even bring the horses, since the Fetch could
track their route as well as ours, but I reasoned that I couldn’t take everything
from Grace and Fai. Or myself. So I’d written up false bills of sale, trying to
cover their tracks, too.

I’d shipped Miss May with the horses, but as soon as the owner of
the farm learned we were on the East Coast, she insisted on sending the goat down to us
before the horses were due back. She informed me that Miss May had wreaked more havoc
than any horse she’d ever trained. I chalked up her complaints to goat ignorance.
If Miss May didn’t get what she expected, when she expected it, she’d let
you know. For instance, she was usually quiet for most of the morning as long as she had
a treat after breakfast. So when I opened the door armed with an oatmeal cookie, Miss
May trotted up, her dark coat shining like a Hollywood starlet’s mink. She took
the cookie I offered gently, then ran off, her white tail twinkling at me.

I nudged a cookie out of the jar for myself, picked up
my mug, and headed back upstairs. Caleigh’s noise had brought me down to the
kitchen before I could check my e-mail.