“Spirits of this house,” she said again, using the same booming voice as a movie narrator or game show host, “we call on you to speak. Announce yourselves to us!”
Silence. They sat with their eyes closed, listening to the gentle creaking of the wood. Trenton was aware of the feel of Katie’s fingers on the inside of his wrists, and the soft warmth of her hands.
“What’s supposed to happen?” Trenton asked, after a bit.
“Shhh.”
He opened his eyes. Katie was very still and very serious and reminded him of a small animal listening for predators.
“I don’t think—”
“Shhh.” She opened her eyes again to glare at him.
Then he heard it: a rustling sound from one of the corners. Katie must have heard it, too.
“What was that?” she asked excitedly, dropping his hands. “Did you hear that?”
“Probably mice,” Trenton said, trying to sound calm. It probably was, anyway; he’d seen a whole pile of mouse shit when he was moving the dresser.
“Close your eyes. Come on.” She seized his hands again, before he had a chance to wipe them off. “Spirits of the other realm,” she said, assuming that voice again. “We come to you as friends, as fellow creatures of the dark . . . ”
This time he was sure he heard a snicker.
“We ask that you open your secrets to us . . . ”
Underneath Katie’s words, rising to the surface of his hearing, like objects surging up on the tide, he suddenly heard a profusion of voices.
“This is her doing.”
“Don’t be mad, Alice. A little séance never hurt anyone.”
“Stop your idiocy, Sandra, please. For once in your death.”
“Testy, testy.”
“Please. Both of you. Stop it.”
They came from all sides, from everywhere and nowhere. Little points of pain exploded in Trenton’s head, as though each word were an arrow fired into his brain. He dropped Katie’s hands and, without realizing it, cried out. It was worse than a migraine. It was worse than anything.
“Trenton,” Katie’s voice seemed distant now, muffled behind layers of cloth. “What is it? Are you okay?”
The other voices were real, sharp, finely tuned, louder and clearer than he’d ever heard them.
“Look at him. Just look at him. And you still claim he doesn’t hear?”
“Calm down, Alice, don’t get your panties in a bunch.”
“Everything will be ruined . . . ”
There were fists pummeling Trenton’s brain, and colored lights blooming behind his eyes. He had to get out. He had to get away. He started to stagger to his feet, on legs that no longer moved the way he wanted, a puppet trying to move its wooden limbs. Katie was still shouting from behind her layers of cloth, but he could no longer hear what she was saying. He managed to stand, finally, and cracked his head on the ceiling.
“Leave us alone. Can you hear me, Trenton? Leave us alone.”
Trenton opened his mouth to reply, no longer caring if Katie thought he was crazy. He didn’t care about anything but making the pain stop.
But before he could speak, or shout, he felt a motion in the air—as though a dozen windows had been opened at once. At the same time, lightly—just lightly—the pressure of a hand on his back.
He stumbled. And then the candles turned over. Not singly, but all at once, so that in one split second, in a time too quick to register, the blanket was on fire and there was smoke unfurling like ribbons from the ground and Katie was screaming.
“Trenton!” Katie’s terror cut through the muffling, through the fog in Trenton’s brain, through the other voice, receding now but still distinct, repeating the same words, over and over.
“What have you done, Alice? What the hell did you do?”
AMY
It was fun to hide, even though she had to sit in a little ball on the floor, and it was cold in the attic and also smelled weird. She had to be very careful to be quiet because that was how people found you, if you moved a lot or made sounds. That was how Amy always found her mom when they played hide-and-seek because Mommy didn’t know how to sit still and also she always hid in the same spot, under the bed.
Mommy wasn’t a good hider but Amy was. She could hide for hours without moving hardly and stay quiet as a mouse or even quieter. It was fun to watch people when they couldn’t see you, like being God or the Eye of Judgment in The Raven Heliotrope, which was invisible but there in the curve of the sky and everywhere at once, so the whole world was mapped on the inside of its eyeball.
Back home, Amy had found a little hole that went from her closet through to her mother’s closet and sometimes she hid there when Mommy thought she was doing something else, like napping or watching TV, and then she liked to watch her mom being her mom when she thought she was all alone and Amy wasn’t there to be the daughter.
Except one time there was a stranger there with her mom, a man, and Mommy was naked, and he was naked and ugly and Amy didn’t like looking at him. But Mommy had kissed him and made little noises like Brewster, the neighbor’s dog, when he was about to pee on the floor. Amy didn’t like that and she was glad the man went away and never came back, but now she didn’t like to watch her mom so much anymore.
Amy didn’t understand what Trenton and the dead girl were doing, but she thought maybe Trenton was trying to make Grandpa come back to life like the dead girl did. It was fun to watch even if she couldn’t see that good because she was hiding behind a stack of big cardboard boxes and could see only through a little crack between them.
But then Trenton got mad and was holding his head like her nana did in the mornings if you woke her up by talking too loud, and the dead girl was calling out, and Amy started to get scared but she didn’t want to move because if Trenton saw her he’d be even madder.
And then there was fire and she knew it was fire because Trenton kept saying it and also because she’d seen it before, in Nana’s house in wintertime and also this one time Mommy tried to cook dinner and something happened and then there was fire on the stove. And Mommy screamed stay back, Amy, stay back, and pressed Amy back far against the wall while she sprinkled white stuff on the fire to make it go away.
So Amy stayed back and didn’t make a sound because that was what Mommy told her to do and because she didn’t want Trenton to be mad. She pressed her knees to her chest and stayed small, and quiet.
ALICE
In The Raven Heliotrope, I wrote a scene about a fire: the palace of the Innocents burns down after it’s raided by marauding Nihilis. The Innocents outsmart them and flee through a hidden tunnel to safety. They use magic to lock the palace doors, entrapping the Nihilis, and Penelope asks her pet dragon to burn the whole place down, so the Nihilis can’t desecrate it. The fire was like white ribbons, reaching into the sky. I was very pleased with that sentence, and especially pleased with that image, of the white ribbons.
These flames aren’t like ribbons at all. They’re like mouths, like greedy fingers, like something alive: leaping, running up the walls, swallowing boxes and broken furniture.
“Are you proud of yourself?” Sandra’s voice is like the hiss and pop of the flames. “You’ll kill them all.”
I can’t answer. I can’t speak at all. I’m breaking apart on billows of smoke: memories are floating up from distant, buried places. Throwing up, day after day, in the toilet, clutching the porcelain for support; sheets stained with blood and water; the willow tree running its long thin fingers along the ground, as though searching, searching for something.
“What’s going to happen?” The new ghost sounds like she’s about to cry. “Are they going to burn? Are we going to burn?”
Trenton has managed to extinguish the blanket. But the fire has already spread too far. It jumps from surface to surface, skates across the old wooden bureau, hooks onto the low-beamed ceiling, and starts its climb.
Katie is on her hands and knees, looking for something. Trenton tri
es to pull her backward, toward the stairs. She wrenches away from him.
“My phone,” she says. She is wide-eyed, sweaty. “I need to find my phone.”
“Forget about that.” Trenton, coughing, grabs her elbow, but she shakes him off again.
“Do something,” Sandra is practically shrieking. “You got them into this mess.”
I open my mouth; my voice is the sound of smoke. “It’s too late,” I say.
Murderer. The word reaches me faintly. Sandra’s voice, or a voice from long ago, from beneath the willow tree.
AMY
Amy’s throat hurt and she was hot, and she wanted to run downstairs and get in bed, and she wanted her mommy. But there was no way out. Everything was on fire, and she couldn’t see, and she couldn’t make herself any smaller, but the fire was sniffing around her shoes like a mouse except it wasn’t a mouse, it was something that would kill you.
Amy was going to die and go in the ground and maybe she would never, ever wake up.
She began to cry. And crying hurt her throat even more, which made her cry harder. She was all alone in the dark and the fire, and she was going to go in the dirt and there would be bugs there. She curled up in a ball on the floor and tried to be so small even the fire wouldn’t find her.
She was the best hider. Mommy always said so.
It was very hot, like Mommy had put too many blankets on the bed.
She was tired.
Something moved. Someone shouted.
Amy’s eyes were heavy, and it took her a long time to open them. The girl, the dead girl, was looking at her through smoke thick like dark water.
“Oh my God,” the dead girl said.
The dead girl went away, and Amy closed her eyes again. But then the dead girl was back, somehow. She’d walked straight through the fire. Maybe because she was dead and she wasn’t afraid.
The dead girl was lifting Amy. Amy wanted to ask what it was like to be dead, but she couldn’t make her tongue move and her head hurt too bad and she was so tired.
“Shhh,” the dead girl said. “It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.”
Her hair smelled like flowers.
MINNA
It took Minna two days to work up the courage to climb up into the attic and assess the damage; then she did it only because her mom reminded her they would not be in Coral River much longer. When she finally managed it, she thought for one confused second it must have snowed. Then she realized it was cottonseed. Cottonseed and bird shit. The roof was partly gone. Sunlight filtered down over the charred wood, the burned remains of old cardboard boxes and termite-riddled furniture, whatever had been stashed up here, all of it covered in a layer of white. Even now she could see the drift of cottonseed across the blue sky. A raven was hopping around among the rubbish, pecking, turning over scraps with its beak.
“Get out of here,” Minna said, aiming a kick in its direction. It startled and went flapping, a blur of dark wings, into the sky.
Toadie appeared next to her a second later, carrying latex gloves and a box of 39-gallon industrial trash bags, like the kind Minna used for raking and carting leaves. “Looks like you got carpet-bombed,” he said, toeing a bit of white-streaked wood with a shoe.
She hadn’t cried at all since her dad died and didn’t intend to. But seeing the evidence of the fire, the birds an occasional black blot against the sun, she felt an incredible, an immeasurable grief. Amy was safe. She knew that. The doctor had told her she would be fine—no asthma even. But Minna couldn’t stop thinking about what could have happened, what had almost happened, how close they had come.
Unimaginable tragedy. She’d heard that expression, somewhere, in an article about a mother who lost her child in an accident. But Minna could imagine it, in vivid detail, and she had been ever since Trenton called her, breathless, half senseless, two nights earlier. Fire, fire. That’s all she remembered hearing, and the sharp cry of sirens in the background. Fire.
When Amy had grabbed the phone and started to sob, Minna’s knees nearly gave out. She’d always thought that was just an expression, but it wasn’t. She actually felt her legs simply stop working, like they’d been vaporized.
Still, the fear stayed with her. She’d had a dream the night before they were all on a roller-coaster ride, hurtling through the darkness, and sparks kept grinding out from under the wheels. She hated it when her subconscious churned out such obvious metaphors.
She couldn’t even masturbate. She’d tried yesterday, in bed, in the shower, even in the study, now empty of everything but furniture, thinking that might be the problem, the source of the horrible tenseness inside of her, a swollen feeling, like she was filling slowly with steam. But she couldn’t even get close. Pleasure came in a short initial wave and then petered out. She worked her own hand so hard against her body that she was left feeling raw, with a headache from gritting her teeth.
“You okay?” Toadie said. He put a hand on her arm, so his fingers grazed the inside of her elbow. She tried to pretend it excited her and turned to him, forcing a smile.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Thank you. For helping.”
“You know I could never say no to you,” he said. He had little webbed lines by his eyes when he smiled now. He was a lot larger. But otherwise he looked just the same.
Two weeks ago she wouldn’t have said she’d been in love with Toadie in high school—prom weekend she’d ended up fucking his friend Peter Contadino in the bathroom—but now she was beginning to think that maybe he was the only person she had ever truly loved. She was remembering all the good times: the gentleness of his touch, as if he was always afraid she might shatter; staying up on his roof to watch the sun touch everything in turn, making each house, valley, and hill real again, like God bringing nameless things out of the dark. While her parents were negotiating the terms of their separation—which was just as complex and entangled as their marriage—Minna had practically moved into Danny’s house, sleeping most nights on the pull-out sofa in his basement. She remembered how she had once woken in the middle of the night to find him sleeping next to her, shirtless, one hot arm slung around her waist, his chest pressed to her back. Thinking he finally wanted to have sex, she reached for him. But he stopped her. “You were crying in your sleep,” he’d whispered, and for a moment she was rigid with embarrassment, with fear. He had stroked her hair until she fell asleep, as if she were a child; and they had never mentioned it again.
“You got a roof guy?” Danny asked, passing her a pair of latex gloves. “I got a roof guy, if you need one.”
That was, Minna thought, the essence of Toadie. He had a roof guy. Some things never changed. She didn’t know whether it was comforting or depressing.
Maybe she could be in love with Danny again. Maybe that was it. She could fix whatever was broken, get married, learn how to fold socks and make casseroles or whatever normal wives did. She tried to imagine living with Danny, staying with him, but could call up nothing but an image of his bedroom when they were teenagers—the rumpled NY Rangers sheets and plastic blinds, the mason jar full of sea glass he’d had on his windowsill since he was a kid.
Just like she couldn’t really picture screwing him. She’d decided she would screw him, she should; it was only right. Like old times, except in the old times they’d never done more than kiss and fumble around. But he wasn’t gay. He was recently separated; he had a daughter a little older than Amy. So that was okay; he could obviously get it up.
But she just couldn’t picture it. Whenever she tried, she imagined only a blur of flesh, and an amalgam of various men and places and bedrooms: pink fleshy stomachs and sweating hands and the sounds of panting.
“What happened, anyway?” Danny moved away from her. “It looks like something . . . exploded.” He craned his neck to look at the hole in the roof. “Nice view, at least.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Trenton wouldn’t give me a straight answer.” She felt it again, the steam pressure of anger with nowh
ere to go.
(I was with a friend, Trenton had said, and Minna had said, What friend? You have no friends. And he’d shut up and stared at her, wounded and reproachful, as if she’d done something wrong.
After a minute, he’d blurted, It was a séance.
And she had felt a fist in her chest, in her throat, everywhere. How long had it been building up? She couldn’t keep track. A séance, she repeated, and he looked away. For what? For that stupid ghost story?
It’s real, he said, his voice getting high-pitched. It’s real, Minna.
You almost killed Amy.
Well, I didn’t, did I? I got her out.
She’d slapped him then. Hard. But it didn’t help the tightness, everywhere, like she would explode. Maybe this is what a spark felt like, just before it became fire: like it could destroy the whole universe.)
“Poor guy,” Danny said. “He must be lonely up here.”
“We’re all lonely up here,” Minna said quickly, without intending to.
“Hard to believe you’re ever lonely, Min,” Danny said. He touched her hand quickly. “You were always the most popular girl in town.”
Minna turned away from him. She felt nauseated, looking at the ruins of the attic and the sky and all the cottonseed floating down. She was always lonely. That was the problem. It was like a hunger.
She’d thought having Amy would help and it did, for a while; but Amy was growing up now.
Danny squatted and began sifting through the mess. His jeans were a little too short, and she could see his socks—athletic socks, a little yellowed—but she pretended not to notice. He looked older than he should have; he was only twenty-nine. But she felt older than she was—she felt so tired.
“Look at this.” From the ashes, he extracted something colorful. It was a pink sweatshirt with black skulls all over it. One of the sleeves was burned away. “It isn’t yours, is it?”
“No.” She thought about what Trenton said, about being with a friend. But where could he have met anyone? He had barely left the house. “It’s probably been there for years,” she said. “Trash it.” But the sweatshirt had reminded her. “Any luck on the girl—Vivian? The one from Boston?”