A scream shattered the night. At first it sounded feral, inhuman, even unworldly. I leaped up from my wingback reading chair in the study, dropping my book on the wide-plank floor, and heard my husband’s studio door jolt open at the back of the house. When he found me waiting in the front hall, he was gripping his letterpress composing stick, still wearing his stained apron with its rich scent of printer’s ink. We said nothing, just waited in shaken silence. Our sash windows were raised both upstairs and down to let in the evening air, and outside noises, we both knew, often seemed closer in the dark. Still, the scream was so sharp it seemed to have emanated from nearby, maybe even from the unmowed yard out front. I wondered—hoped, really—if coyotes were about to chorus, as the local pack sometimes did upon being prodded by the single wailing cry of an alpha individual. But no other voices joined in. By the time we opened the door of the farmhouse surrounded by enveloping black maples, the world was calm again aside from moths and nameless insects thudding against the porch light, and, from indoors, the faint continuation of a piano concerto by Saint-Saëns on the radio.
“Maisie?” I shouted, peering into the near darkness past the overgrown hedge of lilacs that bordered the yard as I called our daughter’s name.
Moths and Saint-Saëns were joined by the drone of crickets from every quarter of the woods and fields around the house. Nothing else. Often, I reminded myself, the lone coyote who isn’t answered simply moves along. Or perhaps what we’d heard was the death screech of a rabbit being killed by one of those same neighborhood coyotes. In Ireland once, I heard a hare being snatched from life, probably by a hungry fox, and the bloodcurdling scream that ripped the night in half was one I’d never forgotten.
My husband called her name again, louder. “Maisie!”
Our older daughter, Nicole, who still lived in our East Village apartment, wouldn’t join us upstate until the weekend, several days hence. But young Maisie was spending her August here as she had done for half a dozen years running, at the restored farmhouse in the Hudson Valley where we’d made it our annual custom to take off work the last month of summer and flee the city for greener terrain. Earlier that afternoon, she had biked, as she often did, the couple of miles to town—if a church, gas station with deli, antiques barn, and roadside bar can be so designated—to hang around with friends, play video games, stream movies, maybe cook out. Her girlfriends sometimes came here too, even though we couldn’t provide them with a decent Internet connection, and the joys of bird-watching, picking wild blueberries, and swimming in the nearby water hole only went so far. She should be heading home at any moment.
Whereas the scream unsettled us before, now it was the throbbing quiet. At half past eight this time of year there was still light, if faint and swift-fading. Without exchanging a word—Will and I had been married some two decades and often intuited each other’s thoughts—we hastened down the steps, across the uneven bluestone path, and out to the country road, where we headed in the direction of town. Whether consciously or not, he still brandished his metal composing stick, a classic tool used by centuries of letterpress printers and one, I expect, rarely if ever used to fend off a possible assailant.
We hadn’t gone fifty paces before we caught sight of her coming toward us, dully luminescent against the murky backdrop. Not racing on her bicycle, as that shriek—now I knew it had been human—might have led me to expect, she was walking it along with an oddly deliberate, slow, rigid gait, her head tilted forward. When we reached her, I saw the determination set on her tear-streaked face, ashen as pumice in the waning light. My words tumbled over Will’s as we stood together in the unpaved road, hugging the girl, stiff with fear, between us.
“Maisie, what happened? Was that you? Are you hurt?”
“Your brother,” was all she said in response, her voice reedy and breathless, gripping the handles of her old Schwinn Black Bomber, which she had spotted at a yard sale several summers before and lovingly restored with her father.
Looking over at my husband, I saw that he was as bewildered as I.
“You mean Uncle Adam?” I asked, as gently as I could, glancing around in the growing darkness, feeling at once alarmed and a little foolish.
“He was just there,” she insisted, voice tight, and pointed back down the road in the direction she had been coming from.
“But, Maisie. My brother’s been gone since before you were even born. He’s not with us anymore. You know that.”
She shook her head violently, like a much younger girl. “He was, though. I know he’s dead. But he looked just like in the photos.”
“Stay here,” Will said, and walked back into the gloaming—beyond where we could see him—less to confirm whether my dead brother was inexplicably, impossibly, lurking there than to convince Maisie that the road was deserted.
When he returned to us, striding with a bit of fatherly exaggeration, he assured her, “Nobody’s down there, honey. No ghosts, no nothing. Even the birds have gone to bed.”
“Please, I want to go inside,” was all she said in response.
Without another word, my hand on Maisie’s shoulder, I marched next to her toward the house. Will, wheeling the bicycle on her other side, kept glancing back into the dark, apparently pantomiming his concern, as if to reassure her no one was following. Ahead, the familiar windows of the house were illuminated with an amber glow that on any other evening would have filled me with a sense of peace. Tonight, the long ribbons of shadow and light they cast across the lawn had instead an intimidating noir effect.
As my husband leaned the bicycle against the porch rail, Maisie retrieved something from the basket. It wasn’t until we were up the steps and into the entrance hall, with the door closed behind us, that she spoke again, her dark eyes averted. Choking back tears, she managed, “He said to give this to you,” and held out a thin, rectangular package wrapped in butcher’s paper and tied with bakery twine.
Will scowled as he took the package from her hands. “Who said?” he asked, before slipping it into the wide front pocket of his apron.
Now in the warm light of the hallway, it was plain that Maisie had taken a nasty fall. Her right forearm and elbow were abraded and caked with bloodied dirt, and her thin, tanned right leg and both knees were scraped. I interrupted, “My God, what’s this? Maisie, you’re bleeding all over.”
She looked down at herself with reddened eyes, examining her knees as if they were someone else’s. “I guess I must’ve fallen off my bike harder than I thought.” At that, I saw both palms were also chafed.
“You guess? Let’s get you cleaned up,” I said, again hugging her to me, not only to comfort the girl but to steady myself as well. “That looks like it hurts.”
“A little,” was her benumbed response as we walked, Maisie limping a bit, down the foyer into the kitchen, where I washed her wounds with warm, soapy water. To my relief, her lacerations appeared to be superficial, but I fought to hide the anger welling in me, crowding out my earlier fear. I applied antiseptic ointment and bandages, crushing their wrappers in my fist.