“Do you believe in God?” she’d asked me last summer.
“No,” I’d told her, and Lexie had said: “I believe in a thousand little gods.”
I thought of Lexie’s thousand little gods as we pulled up the long, circular driveway to Sparrow Crest, my grandmother’s ivy-covered stone house looming like a small mountain. And behind it, the two hills forming a perfect tree-lined backdrop: Lord’s Hill on the left, the slightly taller Devil’s Hill to the right. The story went that the earliest settlers named it Devil’s Hill because of the rough, rocky terrain. One of the first families to settle in town built their house at the base of the other hill, and their last name was Lord. Growing up, this explanation seemed far too boring, so Lexie and I would make up crazy stories about God and the devil battling it out in the woods behind Sparrow Crest. Lexie would point at the woods and say, “You see which hill is bigger, don’t you? The devil wins every time, Jax.”
Between the hills was a small valley that the stream ran through, all the way down to the river on the other side.
“What’s up with all the no-trespassing signs?” I asked, noticing them nailed to trees all along the driveway.
“Lexie put them up,” Diane said, lips tightening.
This didn’t fit with the image she was trying to sell me of Lexie being the most popular woman in town. I bit my tongue to keep from saying, Why, so she could keep all her good friends out?
And there, at the house’s foot, was my dead sister’s yellow Mustang. A ridiculous car for Vermont. Impossible to drive during the long winters. But it was utterly hers, and seeing it brought the tears again.
Aunt Diane put her hand on mine. “Are you ready?” she asked, looking from me to the house.
She’d already warned me that she hadn’t cleaned up anything. That the house was in a horrible state.
“Ready or not,” I said.
* * *
The summer I was ten and Lexie was thirteen, things truly began to change. She’d spent the winter sick with mononucleosis—holed up in her room with sketchpads and books and an old TV our father had dragged up there, hibernating. And when she emerged in the spring, she wasn’t the same. It wasn’t just that she was thinner and more hollowed-out looking. She had a hard time focusing on conversations. She was quick to anger and swore all the time. Mom let it slide and Ted was amused, especially when Lex starting using his own colorful curses: Cock-sucking pigs was a favorite. Mom said I should ignore my sister’s freak-outs. “It’s hormones,” she said. “Your sister is going through big changes.”
I thought the “big changes” meant Lex had gotten her period. I saw the wrappers from pads and tampons in the bathroom. Mom fussed over her. Bought her new clothes, special face masks, hair ties, and pills for cramps. Lexie was restless, couldn’t seem to hold still. On her sleepless nights, she’d stay with our father in his garage art studio, the two of them grooving out to classic rock and making sculptures out of wire, clothespins, and playing cards. Once, they stayed up all night making a working pinball machine out of an old card table, mousetraps, pieces of hose, rusted pulleys, and a lot of rubber bands.
That summer, when we went to Sparrow Crest, Lexie wanted to share her every secret with me—she kept me up until dawn some nights, talking and talking, telling stories, braiding my hair, painting my nails with fancy nail polish Mom had bought for her. Some days she wouldn’t leave her room. One night, I woke up to pee and saw the light on in her room. I went in, but she wasn’t there. She wasn’t downstairs, or anywhere in the house, even though it was two in the morning. I opened the front door and went out to the pool. It was pitch-dark, so dark I could barely make out her shape. She was crouched, whispering to the water. I moved closer, creeping along the side of the house, wanting to know what she wished for.
“Hello? Are you there?” She seemed to listen for a minute, then stood and tugged her nightgown off over her head and slipped naked into the dark water. I held my breath, watching, waiting, making sure she was okay. Fifteen minutes later, she was back in her clothes and on her way into the house.
I asked her about it the next day. “Where were you last night? I woke up and you weren’t in your room. Where’d you go?”
She looked at me like I was crazy. “You must have been dreaming, Jax.”
Now, as I stepped through the heavy wooden door of Sparrow Crest and surveyed the wreckage, I wished I was dreaming. “What the hell happened in here?”
“I know,” Aunt Diane said. “It’s bad. Worse than bad. Poor Lexie. I was here two weeks ago, and she seemed fine. All wrapped up in her genealogy project.”
I nodded, looked around at the family photos carelessly strewn all over the front hall. “Right,” I said. This was quintessential Lexie. At the beginning of a manic phase, she’d take on projects and seem like she had a handle on them. Then things quickly spun out of control.
Diane’s face tensed and she said in a low voice, more to herself than to me, “I should have checked in on her again. I should have at least called.”
I took her hand and gave it a squeeze. “You can’t blame yourself.”
“I know,” she said, pulling away from me, making her way into the living room. She walked slowly, hesitantly, like she was a little afraid of what she might find there.
I left my roller bag by the front door and moved down the hall, plowing my way through paper, envelopes, drawings, mail, a rusty bucket, batteries. The old slate floor had large puddles of water on it. The little side table on the left was overturned. Cherished pictures—the sketch of Sparrow Crest by my great-grandfather, a wedding photo of my grandmother and grandfather, a yellow cross-stitch done by my grandmother when she was a little girl that read To err is human, to forgive, divine—were off the wall and on the floor, the glass smashed. I picked up a tangled nest of rope.
My aunt’s phone rang, and she answered it. “Hi. Yup. She’s here. Yeah. Uh-huh. We’re at Sparrow Crest.” She turned from me, listened a minute, laughed.
I took out my own phone and looked at it. I’d had the ringer off. There were two new calls, one voice mail. I listened to the message. It was my client, Declan Shipee. All of my clients had my cell number to use in case of emergency. Declan had never called me before.
“You were wrong, Jackie,” he said, voice small and faraway sounding. “The things in dreams, they can follow you into real life. Call me back, please. It’s important.”
I blew out a breath. I’d have to call Declan later, when I was alone and feeling a little less frazzled.
“Yeah, I know,” my aunt was saying into her phone. “Thanks. Talk later.” She hung up. “Terri wanted to make sure you made it safe and sound.”
“Well, I made it. I’m not so sure about the ‘safe and sound’ part.”
I navigated my way into the living room, past a diving mask and snorkel, a shop lamp attached to a long, heavy-duty extension cord. Every surface was covered with loose-leaf notebook paper full of scribbles and sketches, old photos pulled from albums, photocopied documents covered in notes, half-full cups of tea, plates of fossilized leftovers. Pieces of clothing—a sweater, running shorts, a bathing suit, a terry cloth robe—were scattered and draped. There was a near-empty bottle of Ketel One Vodka on the edge of the coffee table.