The Lace Reader (22 page)

200 Brunonia

Barry

My head hurts. The canopy moves and swirls. To get away from it, I roll over in the bed. The motion turns my stomach. I am going to be sick. I hoist myself up, holding the bedpost. I move slowly, grabbing onto furniture for balance, pulling myself along until I get to the old marble sink in the corner of the room. I turn on the faucet and wait until it runs cold. I douse my face, then pour a glass and make myself drink the entire thing. Then I throw up.

I am drenched with sweat.

I need air.

I walk to one of the windows and lift it open, but it is too heavy, its sash cord broken and dangling. I look around for something to prop it up with, find an old ruler. I walk across the room to open its opposing window. It holds for a moment, then comes crashing down, just missing my fingers. It slams hard, cracking two panes almost symmetrically in half. It jolts me awake.

I move carefully window to window, opening them all. The hot breeze fills the room, bringing up street noise. The curtains billow and snap like old sails, and the lace canopy furls and fills with air, catching my attention with the sound. There’s a rush of salt air, and then the room is full of sailing ships. I am back in time to the Salem of the China-trade era. The huge ships move slowly by one another in the harbor. The merchants in the streets sell spices to the local mistresses, who fight over them, paying a fortune for a small amount of pepper that they will take home and keep locked up in ornate boxes and almost never serve to anyone. I make my way to the edge of the bed. I stretch for the low-hanging border of the canopy, pulling it down. I stuff it under the bed. My head spins and reels. I turn on my side and put my hand against the headboard to still the room. I wait for sleep.

u

The Lace Reader 201

When I wake up again, it’s noon. I feel a pain in my stomach.
When was the last time you ate?
I imagine Eva asking. She would be right. The pain is hunger.

I get up. I’m thinking I should try to make my way downstairs for charred toast and tea. Eva’s cure for anything. I hear a sound. A voice.

At first I think I am hearing Eva’s voice again, and then I recognize the Realtor’s nasal twang. She told me about the showing, but I have completely forgotten. She didn’t say that I wasn’t supposed to be here when she showed the house. She just assumed that I would be aware of such protocol. They are coming up the stairs. I hear the Realtor telling the couple about the suspended staircase and how the beams are cantilevered into the walls so that the stairs seem to have no visible means of support. I can tell she doesn’t know I’m in the house, because the story has changed since I told it to her. She stops at the landing window to highlight the gardens below, adding new hybrid flowers to Eva’s collection, not only the one new rose named for Eva but two or three others that I’ve never heard of and that she seems to be making up on the spot. She has also added something about the French doors on the third floor, something that is totally untrue, but I can see that would be a selling point if it were not such an embellishment. Still, I can tell even from here that the people aren’t interested in the house, that her performance is a total waste of time.

“I died for you.”

I stop still. It is Eva’s voice. It is so loud I am certain they must have heard.

They keep coming up the stairs.

I have to get out of here, right now.

Before I have a chance to make my exit, the Realtor and her clients have reached the landing. I move toward the back door. I’m 202 Brunonia

Barry

dizzy, feeling my way along the walls as if the room had gone dark, though I can see every object. Sweat pours down my face. The Realtor catches the movement in her peripheral vision and looks up. I see her notice me and then lead their eyes to the Samuel McIntire woodwork, giving me time to make my escape out the back door and down the servants’ stairs.

I wait for the Realtor in the garden. I am very tense. I can overhear snippets of their conversation as they stand by the gate talking. I am trying to hear them, to ground myself by the sound of their voices, real voices. They are from somewhere in the Midwest. Chicago, maybe. The woman had been to Salem once before, she says, on a tour. She tells the Realtor that she remembered the architecture and thought of Salem when she learned that her husband was about to be relocated to the Boston area.

I can tell that her husband is less than enthusiastic, both about the house and about Salem.

“So do they still burn witches in this town?” He is trying to be funny.

“They don’t burn them, they hang them.” The Realtor smiles. Then she moves the conversation back to the sales pitch. “The property values here are much better than on Beacon Hill,” I hear the Realtor say, trying to charm him. “Or Back Bay for that matter. . . . You’d pay three to four million for a house like this in Back Bay.”

The man asks about the commute. Says it took him forty-five minutes to get here from town. There is vague annoyance in his voice at having to be bothered.

“That’s because of the Big Dig,” the Realtor says to him. “You should have taken the bridge instead of the tunnel.”

He’s not buying it. I can tell that, and so can she. She tells him about the commuter rail, says it’s within walking distance, twenty minutes to the North Station. What most people do is take the train, she says, The Lace Reader 203

but I can tell that this man is not someone who would ever ride the train. This is a man who likes to be in control of his own vehicle. The whole showing is a waste of time. The Realtor tells me later that she knew it going in. “He wanted to take out the gardens,” she says, “to put in a second parking space. Can you imagine?”

She says she has another showing at four and that really it would be better if I were not at home when she comes back. “The owner’s presence tends to intimidate potential buyers,” she says. “At least if they know you’re there.”

I make my way into the house. Put on water for tea. Regular Assam and charred toast. I make myself swallow. By midday, I am starting to feel a little better.

I’ve totally forgotten that Ann is scheduled to meet me on her lunch hour to help me deadhead the flowers. She shows up just as the party-boat horns blast noon. “You okay?” she asks. “You look a little pale.”

“Hungover,” I say. I feel stupid saying it, but it’s convincing.

“Been there, done that,” she says.

She doesn’t have a lot of time, so we get to work immediately. We work together well. Moving down the rows, deadheading the huge blossoms. It’s rhythmic, hypnotic: plucking, gathering, handing the basket back and forth. The heat of the sun is soothing to my aching muscles.

“Thanks,” I say.

At the end of a long row of peonies, I see something white in the bushes. I lean over and pick up today’s
Salem News
from where the paperboy has thrown it. I am used to seeing Eva’s face staring back at me from these papers and am relieved for a moment to see that it has been replaced by another, younger face. Then not as relieved when 204 Brunonia

Barry

I read the name—Angela Rickey. The hair is severe, pulled back in a style that could easily date to Puritan days. Angela’s disappearance has replaced Eva’s as front-page news.

I recognize her immediately.

“She was here,” I say.

“What?”

“I saw her. The first day
I
was here. She came to the door. By the time I got there, she was gone.”

“Where’s your phone?” Ann asks. “We have to call Rafferty.”

He arrives within ten minutes.

I tell him the story. About how I thought she had come back, but it was Beezer and Rafferty instead.

“Are you certain it was her?” Rafferty pulls out another photo, a better copy of the one the paper had been running.

“Except for the birthmark,” I say.

“What birthmark?”

“She had a strawberry-colored birthmark down the side of her face.” I pass my hand down my face from temple to chin. Rafferty and Ann exchange looks.

“What?” I say.

“Was the girl you saw pregnant?” Rafferty asks.

“Yes,” I say. “Quite.”

“It’s got to be her,” Ann says. “Looking for Eva.”

I watch Rafferty consider.

“Is it possible she didn’t know that Eva was missing?” Ann asks.

“Anything’s possible,” Rafferty says. He is formal. Professional. His face is stone.

“Maybe she was trying to give Eva the key,” Ann suggests. “Or looking for help.”

“Okay,” Rafferty says. “Thanks.”

The Lace Reader 205

He turns to leave. It startles me.

“Wait,” I say, putting down the basket. I walk him to the gate.

“How’s your head?” I ask.

“Fine,” he says. “How’s yours?” His voice is clipped, the tone sarcastic. “I’ve gotta go,” he says, and walks away from me. I go back to where Ann is working.

She sees the look on my face. “Lovers’ quarrel?” she asks.

“What? No. . . . I don’t know.”

“Call me old-fashioned, but even when alcohol is involved, I believe it’s customary for the new boyfriend to get upset when you spend the night with the old one.”

I stare at her.

“It’s a small town,” Ann says. “News travels fast.”

“It’s not true,” I say. “Jack was here, but I didn’t sleep with him.”

“Hey, it’s not my business.” Ann goes on deadheading. I put my hands over my eyes, but the world spins and leans. I throw up for the second time, in the middle of the deadhead basket. Ann leaves me on Eva’s couch. I have a fever.

“Probably the heat,” she says. “Or maybe from the surgery.”

I tell her about the surgery. In case it is important. Also to explain why I couldn’t have slept with Jack LaLibertie. Or anyone else for that matter. I want her to know.

“I’ll come by after work,” Ann says. “I have some herbs that will fix you right up.”

I nod. All I want to do is sleep.

The fever dreams take hold. I dream about the climb. The one Lyndley made the day she jumped and the one I kept attempting later, when May was trying to keep me alive.

206 Brunonia

Barry

I had taken Lyndley’s death hard; I had almost died myself. Even Eva thought I should be in a hospital. But May had said no. This was our business. Even the first day she caught me up on the rocks, she still thought she could handle it. She was wrong, of course. The same way she was wrong about a lot of things.

Her reaction was pure May logic. She called the locksmith to come put locks on all the escape routes from our house. And then she had him board up the Boyntons’ house. The front door was locked, double dead-bolted. The locksmith had no problem installing a double lock on Auntie Emma’s door (their house was deserted and boarded up), but he balked at installing one on ours. Double locks were illegal in Massachusetts, because they kept you from getting out in an emergency. He pointed that out to her, but he’d already put locks on all the first-floor windows and some other places, and May refused to pay him if he didn’t finish the job the way she wanted it done. So in the end he gave in.

The locks weren’t meant to keep anyone out; they were meant to keep me in. They had me on suicide watch. Even then, people knew that suicide runs in families, and May wasn’t taking any chances with me.

But May was no match for me when it came to locks. I didn’t even bother with the dead bolt. I had the window locks disabled within about thirty seconds. All it took was a paper clip from the drawer of her desk.

The moon was full, its pull strong. They were wrong about the suicide thing. I wasn’t seeking peace, or not eternal peace anyway. What I was looking for was perspective. To see things through her eyes. Everyone blamed the abuse. They talked about what Cal had done to her. Everyone said we should have seen it coming. But I knew it The Lace Reader 207

was more than that. It was my fault as much as hers. Cal might have abused her. But I had taken away her only hope of escape. And so I made the climb again. To try to see things as she saw them. It was something I had to do.

It was a long climb. Far more difficult than it looked. Some of the dogs came out of their caves to watch me. The birds circled and screeched. Halfway to the top, I cut my foot on a shell the gulls must have dropped. It slid in between my first and second toes, slicing them apart, making the space between them widen. It wasn’t bleeding that hard, considering, but it was continuous, and I couldn’t stop it, so I stopped trying. Instead I just kept climbing, leaving a Hansel and Gretel trail of blood drops behind me in case I couldn’t find my way back home.

It took me what seemed like forever to get to the top, partly because of the shadows cast by the full moon, partly because of my foot.

I stood for a long time at the precipice where the rocks jut forward. The very spot she jumped from. I stared down at the black ocean below. Then I saw that my dress had changed. I was no longer wearing the cutoffs and T-shirt I’d left the house in, but the white nightgown Lyndley was wearing the day she died. The dream shifts perspective again, and I am no longer on the cliff, but in Eva’s parlor on Christmas morning, wearing the white lace nightgown that Eva had given us, one to Lyndley and one to me. And though the view of the water is the same, it is not real, but is the painting Lyndley made for me the last Christmas she was alive. The one she titled
Swimming to the Moon.

I have just undone the wrapping, and I am standing over it, staring at the texture of the water and the figure of my sister, her hair wild and trailing behind, one arm extended, reaching for the path that stretches endlessly in front of her, narrowing as it disappears into 208 Brunonia

Barry

the full moon just above the horizon. I am fascinated by the painting, more fascinated than by any other she has done. I am aware of the voices around me, Eva’s and Beezer’s voices commenting on the painting, telling me how beautiful it is. And I ask them how they were able to surprise me like this. I was notorious for discovering my presents before Christmas Day. How had they possibly kept this big package out of sight until Christmas morning?