“I never knew astronomers had any imagination,” Claire said as she leaned over to look into the ocular. She adjusted it for a few seconds, but she could not see anything. In that socket where a cluster of stars should have been, Claire could make out blackness only.
“Have you found Cygnus?” Ray asked, but she hadn’t really been looking for it. She had begun to feel sad, for no apparent reason. It struck her how pathetic the whole situation was, this little makeshift group of people sitting in a faded living room. They were drawn together by a death, by shared, unspoken grief. Claire searched the night sky for any discernible movement. She thought of an oral report she had delivered in the fifth grade—or was it the sixth? It had been about comets, and she had drawn up an elaborate chart on oak tag for the occasion. Comets, she remembered, have been known to crack up into filaments when plunging earthward, with various particles landing in Ohio, in Wisconsin and on the soft floor of Lake Erie. She thought of this as she looked through the eyepiece, and the images moved her—it seemed that in the middle of all that heat and fuss there always had to be a kind of dispersion, an eventual separating of the elements.
Ray put away the telescope soon after, and Helen went around the rooms, shutting off lights. She did this every night before bed, darkening the house bit by bit. Claire stood in the living room, looking out the window. Ray had tried to be close to her in his own fumbling way. She was touched by it, but she did not know how to respond. That sort of kindness was not something she was used to. Whenever her parents acted nice to her, when they gave her a compliment or an extravagant present, one of them would always ruin the moment. “Go on, open it,” her father had urged on Claire’s nineteenth birthday as she cradled the wrapped package in her arms. So she ripped through the Day-Glo paper, accidentally tearing the gold rosette that had been affixed to the center. “Could you be a little more careful?” her mother said. “That bow might have been used again, you know. You never stop to think about anyone but yourself.”
“I’m sorry,” Claire mumbled, looking to her father for an ally. But he merely looked back silently, his eyes un-giving. The present was a beautiful solid-gold pendant, and when she wore it, it swung from her neck like a weight.
Her parents had lost all of their grace when Seth died. They were abrupt now, harsh. Claire did not really blame them; at least she understood where their fury came from, and she held back. They never tried to be close to her, but she excused them for that, too, thinking that such coldness could not last forever. One day, many years in the future, her parents would get lonely for their children and would reach out. Claire had no idea how she would react. It amazed her that she could be such an optimist in the midst of everything. No one would believe that a death girl could consider herself an optimist, not even the other death girls.
“Come off it,” Laura would say, smirking. “What about Lucy Ascher’s death landscape and all that? You’ve always told us that that’s your world view, too, and now you want us to believe you’re an optimist?”
“Yes,” she would tell them, “I do live in a death landscape. But I never said I liked it, only that I had to live in it.” Human nature was an entirely different issue. Claire had to have put some faith in it or she would not have gone to the Aschers’. If she did not trust human nature, then there wouldn’t be much to go by. You could find only a limited number of things from old sepia photographs and diaries. You had to go beyond them, into the heart of things—into the sadness of Ray Ascher as he stooped to screw together the parts of the telescope. The need to be a parent was still in him. “See,” he had said in a father’s voice, “you fiddle with this to put things in focus. Try it.”
It had made her want to cry. She saw how alone he was, how alone all three of them were. In the first several days she was there, she had not seen this; she had only experienced a kind of disorientation, a perpetual wondering about what she was doing in these strangers’ home. The disorientation had eased a little when she fell into the routine of housecleaning. Each morning she made herself a light breakfast and unloaded the dishwasher. Ray would pad in when she was almost through, and she would heat up water for his coffee. Then she began work around the house, starting with the bedrooms upstairs and making her way down to the basement. She was left alone for most of the day. Ray went off to the college in midmorning, and Helen sat quietly in her favorite chair by the living room window or out on the freezing porch. All was silent in the house.
Now Claire’s job had become ritual, and she moved through the rooms as though she had lived in them all her life. She knew where everything was kept, on which shelf Helen stored her compact sewing kit and the pincushion that looked like a strawberry, in which drawer of the hutch cabinet Ray had his magnifying glass and his shell collection. There was something touching about knowing the small particulars of other people’s lives. When she was changing the sheets in Ray and Helen’s bedroom, she noticed that Helen had left her wedding band on the night table. It was a thin gold ring, and Ray’s and Helen’s first initials were engraved on the inside. Helen wore the ring only every few days—Claire heard her tell Ray that she was afraid she might lose it. “After all, that almost happened once, remember?” Helen had said. She reminded him of the time her ring had slipped off her finger during some laboratory work at the college while she had her hand in the water of a draining tank.
Claire had not heard the beginning of this conversation, and she wondered what had prompted it. She could imagine Ray asking his wife why she hardly wore her wedding ring anymore. His ring was always on his finger. Perhaps, Claire thought, he could not get it off. She had read about cases like that—jewelry that had to be cut free from swollen-jointed fingers. Now that was real love, when your wedding ring was so much a part of you that it had to be cut free. Claire liked to think of small things like that as metaphors for larger concerns. She had always gravitated toward things that lent themselves well to metaphor. The idea of simile especially pleased her; the fact that something could be compared to something else in a way that was far-fetched and yet true made her feel that there just had to be a certain connectedness among all the things in the world. If you didn’t believe that at all, then you were lost, left alone in the night to fend for yourself. This was one of the reasons that the death girls had so quickly banded together freshman year—each of them feared she could not go it alone. Without company, misery turns to sorrow, and sorrow turns inward, curling up in some dark, damp corner.
The death girls had a sort of buddy system going, like the kind used during free swim at Claire’s old summer camp. The head counselor would blow shrilly into the whistle she wore on a lanyard around her neck, and the pairs of buddies would join hands and count off as they stood shivering in the waist-deep water. The death girls counted off each night, making sure that everything was okay and that no one was missing, spiritually speaking.
Claire felt good knowing that she was being taken care of, that she could share some of her thoughts and feelings with Naomi and Laura, but she also knew that this togetherness could go only so far. In the end, she realized, you were always by yourself. She remembered the first time this idea had occurred to her. She had been very small, and her parents had taken her and Seth to see the Ice Capades. They had managed to get front row seats and could see everything from up close. All of the skaters wore sequined costumes that shimmered two-tone under the lights, and colossal purple headdresses that looked like peacock tails at the Bronx Zoo. The skaters were just wonderful; they did cartwheels and back flips and leapt through ignited hoops. But the most exciting part of the evening was when they brought funny little cars out onto the ice and went around selecting children to ride in them.
All of a sudden one of the peacock ladies was standing in front of the Danzigers, holding out her electric arms, and Claire’s mother and father lifted Claire up and out onto the ice. It was not slippery, as she had been afraid it might be. Instead it felt coarse under her feet, like w
alking on the grainy sawdust that was always sprinkled on the floor of the butcher’s shop in Babylon. The lady helped Claire into the car, and they were off. They circled the rink in a blur three times, and at one point the lady lifted up Claire’s hand and made her wave at the audience. She wondered how she would ever find her family again—as the car sped past she frantically scanned the tiers of faces for her parents and brother. She could not locate them, and for the first time in her life Claire understood that she was vulnerable to all the elements of the world. As the funny car was whisked along the ice, she felt as though she were rushing to her fate.
The ride ended soon after, and Claire was easily deposited back in her seat. She could only sit there, stunned, for the rest of the show. When the house lights went up, she pretended to have fallen asleep, and her father had to gather her up in his arms and carry her out to the parking lot.
—
She knew she was making them happier. If not actually happier, then at least more hopeful. Helen’s pace seemed quicker; she walked around the house as though she had a definite purpose, a direction. She was getting bored with her weaving, and unused beach grass was scattered around the rooms. Claire heard Ray tell Helen, “It must be this young blood in the house that’s picking you up.”
“Possibly,” she answered.
You could hear so much in someone else’s house. Even if you had not intended to eavesdrop, the voices rose up and filtered through the walls and under doors. There was a certain new vigor at the Aschers’. One morning Helen actually sat down and wrote out a short list of the things she wanted Claire to do. The list read:
Defrost fridge.
Re-paper kitchen shelves.
Clean out Lucy’s room.
Claire was shaken when she read the last item. She had not spent any time in Lucy’s room before. She had been told it did not need cleaning, so there had been no real reason to go in. But once when Helen was in the bathroom, Claire went and stood in the doorway of Lucy’s bedroom, her heart pounding. She opened the door slowly, expecting to see some kind of ascetic, inspiring sight: a writing desk with an exposed bulb for a lamp, dark peeling walls and a latticework of cobwebs in all the upper corners. But the room was an undistinguished girl’s room: powder-blue carpet, white uncracked walls and ceiling, and a Rousseau print hanging over the bed. She heard Helen flush the toilet down the hall, and she quickly stepped out, closing the door behind her.
Now she had a legitimate reason to be there. Item three: Clean out Lucy’s room. She could not imagine what the job included. She would save it for last, for the very end of the day. Only when she had defrosted the refrigerator and lined the kitchen shelves with clean new paper would she go upstairs to Lucy’s bedroom. It was no secret place; it was not one of those rooms that could be reached only through a hidden sliding panel at the back of a fireplace. It was her own obsession that made it seem that way. What did she expect to find there, after all—another notebook, a sequel to Sleepwalking?
When Claire went up to Lucy’s room at the end of the day, she sat down for a few minutes in the center of the carpet, getting her bearings. The room had obviously been gone through many times. It was also obvious that this was the room of someone who had died. Claire was an expert on this, having spent the last five years living in a house with such a room.
The bedroom of a dead child always had an artificial ambience. A selection of the child’s belongings was arranged in a kind of order that strained to appear casual and random. Representative objects were lined up on the shelf in loving tribute. It was as though the parents were trying desperately to piece together a life, using whatever was available.
There had been a family of sparrows living on the ledge outside Claire’s window at school freshman year, and she remembered feeling the same kind of hopelessness each morning as she watched the mother bird fly back and forth building up the nest, scraps of twine and pencil shavings dangling from her beak.
Claire stood up and began to look for things to do. She ran a rag over the furniture, and dust came off in a thick layer on the cloth. She moved the four-poster away from the wall and began to vacuum. She did not hear Helen come in because of the noise, but when she turned around she was there, leaning against the door. Claire shut off the vacuum switch with her foot. Its groaning died away, and the room was quiet. The two women faced each other.
“Claire,” Helen said, “do you like it here?”
“Where?”
“In this room.”
“Yes,” Claire said, guarded.
“I thought you might want to move in here. It’s bigger. You’d be more comfortable, I think.” Helen’s voice was subdued, and she was looking directly at Claire. She made her feel very tense.
A pulse jumped in Claire’s neck. She paused, then said, “Okay. I’ll get my stuff.”
Helen smiled. “Good,” she said, and she slipped out the door.
She was an odd woman, Claire thought. At first she had seemed aimless, but in the past two days she had been saying and doing things as though she had a purpose. Claire went down the hall to the guest room and got her things together. She didn’t have much with her. She carried her clothes into Lucy’s room and stood with them piled in her arms, not sure of where she should put them. She slid open the top dresser drawer and placed some of her shirts next to Lucy’s shirts. Side by side, the dark among the dark. She put everything away, and her own clothes took up exactly half of the dresser. She had some trouble closing the last drawer; it stuck on its runners for a second. She jammed it shut with the flat of her hand, and the whole room seemed to shudder at the vibration. The trinkets on the dresser top trembled.
“Lucy?” she said.
There was no answer. She was alone in the room; there was no other presence in there with her. The ghost seemed to have lifted from the house. She had felt it happening over the past few days, had felt it fading. She envisioned a showdown at dawn.
But that wouldn’t happen. Claire had replaced the ghost of Lucy Ascher, and there was no real reason for it to hover overhead any longer. She hadn’t even been aware of a competition until that moment. Now, alone in Lucy’s room, she felt that she could stay there for a long time. She felt superior. She was living, she breathed more than cold, underground death air. The pulse in her neck jumped once again. She placed her fingers over it lightly, as though it were a cricket she was cupping in the grass.
Part 3
chapter twelve
Naomi the death girl came to his door late at night. Julian had been in the midst of a fretful sleep. He dreamed that he was running frantically down Fifth Avenue and that he was very late for the SAT exam. By the time he reached the building where it was being given, the students had just put down their No. 2 pencils, and the test was over. The proctor gave Julian an evil, satisfied smile. The knocking woke Julian at once and he leapt from his bed, glad to be free of the dream. He was wearing drawstring pajama bottoms and no top, and he felt very self-conscious as he let Naomi in. The room was completely dark and smelled of sleep. He turned on his desk lamp and then opened a window to air the place out. It was only after he had done these things that he began to wonder what she could possibly want with him.
“Oh, I woke you up,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he said, his voice still groggy.
She sat down on his desk chair while he sat on the edge of the bed. The lamplight made her look old. She bent her head and picked at a hangnail for a few seconds before speaking. He could see the dark roots in her bleached hair.
“I bet you’re really surprised to see me here,” she said finally. “We’ve been bitches to you, Laura and I. I promise you that’s all over, as far as I’m concerned. I needed to talk to you tonight. You’re the only one who would understand this. If you don’t want to listen, though, just tell me and I’ll go.”
“I’ll listen,” he said. “It has t
o be about Claire. You know I’ll listen to that.”
“That’s what I figured,” Naomi said. “She called me tonight. At first I didn’t even recognize her voice. She sounded kind of different, and I wasn’t sure it was her. She called because she wanted to tell me that she’s not coming back, and she said it defiantly, as if she wanted me to object, to make her leave.”
“What do you mean?” Julian asked. “Why don’t you just tell me where she is, to begin with, and then I can try to understand this stuff.” He began to feel fully awake.
“Okay,” Naomi said. “I wasn’t going to tell you. I swore to Claire that I wouldn’t say anything to anyone. But I have to break that promise because I’m all alone in this and I don’t know what to do. Laura’s off chanting in a closet or something.”
“Tell me,” Julian interrupted, his voice tight.
So she told him. She started from the beginning, from the night that the three death girls had sat on the floor and talked about getting their fill of their poets.
“We encouraged Claire,” Naomi admitted. “We made her see that there were other things she could do if she really wanted to put herself into Lucy Ascher’s life. I thought it would sort of, you know, exorcise the Lucy thing. Instead, all it did was throw her further into it. I never dreamed this would happen.”
“What are you talking about?” Julian asked. “You come in here and wake me up and expect me to know what you’re talking about. Where is Claire?”
“You’d better swear you won’t ever tell her that I told you. Please, Julian. She’d never trust me again.”
“Okay,” he said. “I swear.”
“She’s there,” Naomi said, “at the Aschers’ house. She’s been living with them as their cleaning woman.”
Julian slid farther back on the bed, leaning against the wall. He ached to be at home, in his own room, with the headphones on, piping in the Grateful Dead. He would eat a wonderful dinner with his parents—baked chicken, asparagus shoots, sweet potatoes—and then wander upstairs into his own private domain. He would climb into his bed and listen to his favorite music until he fell asleep. In the middle of the night, he would feel someone—his mother, most likely—come in and slip off his headphones and disentangle the cord, careful not to disturb him.