Sometimes I still wished Maisie felt comfortable calling me Mom instead of by my name—though I wished far more that her biological mother had lived to raise the girl herself. My best friend, Mary Chandler, was the only person for whom that appellation would ever make a natural fit. Maisie wasn’t bothered when we referred to ourselves as her parents. But just as she rarely called Will Dad, I would always be Meghan, her loving, stand-in mom, even though I mothered her as naturally as I did our natural-born Nicole.
“There’s an analgesic in that ointment that should help with the pain,” I said, aware that I needed to let her retreat to her room. Unlike Nicole, Maisie, for all her friends, was a private soul, and I’d learned there were times, like now, when I could minister to her afflictions only so far.
“You’ll let us know if you need anything,” Will added, his supplicating expression revealing to me, if not to Maisie, that he was displeased with how he’d handled her disturbing experience. Her eyes still red, she gave him an oddly wise and forgiving smile—the kind only the young can offer to the old, the innocent to the informed—pushed her chair back, and rose.
“Everything’s good. Don’t worry about me.” And with that, she left us sitting at the table looking at each other.
My thoughts were addled as I tried to make sense of what was going on. Why the man had chosen Maisie to be his messenger, the blameless handmaiden of a convicted criminal, I could only imagine. But if he was who Will and I both tacitly assumed he was, I knew he’d have no qualms about terrorizing anybody associated with my husband. Given the thick woods surrounding the front and sides of our house, as well as our isolation here, it wouldn’t have been much of a challenge to spy on us for a time and mark our young daughter as his target. I got up, poured each of us a glass of Scotch, and set them on the table, thinking it was likely cowardice behind the assailant’s decision to make Maisie deliver the parcel on his behalf. Or at least a disinclination to confront Will face-to-face, unannounced, after such a long time and given the bad blood between them.
When I’d heard Maisie close her bedroom door and knew she was out of earshot, I asked Will, my voice lowered, “Henry Slader?”
“Who else could it possibly be,” he said, sipping his drink.
“Is he even out of prison?”
“So it would seem. I’ve spent as little time thinking about him as humanly possible.”
He was right. Slader’s wretched name had rarely come up since his trial and conviction for his brazen assault on my husband years ago.
“But Adam didn’t look anything like Slader,” I said.
“Who knows what he was up to. The question is why he’s doing any of this now.”
We sat at the kitchen table for a time, as the music faintly continued and the clock calmly ticked. I broke our silence.
“Aren’t you going to open the package? Or at least read what’s in the envelope?”
Will hesitated, swirled the contents of his glass, intent upon its golden hue. “You know, it’s entirely possible he’s out there in the yard looking at us.”
An owl, a great horned that nested nearby, hooted. It reminded us both that while, yes, we were sitting in the relative privacy of the house, the world just outside the windows was very much with us. In the distance, a lower-pitched female owl faintly answered our neighbor’s call.
“Maybe we should pull the shades,” I said, eyeing a kitchen window through which I could see nothing other than inky darkness.
He shook his head. “And give him the pleasure? No, I’m sure nothing he’s written or sent needs immediate attention. Damn his eyes anyway. Attacking Maisie, even if he never laid a finger on her, tells me more than I need to know at the moment. I’ll open it in my own good time, when I’m sure he won’t be able to watch.”
I felt bad for both of these people I loved, even as I was petrified about what was to come. More than anything, I hoped Maisie would not retreat back into her defensive shell as a result of this incident. In the first years after she was orphaned she’d been a bit of a loner, withdrawn and diffident, so any circumstances that helped her to blossom and reenter life were ones we encouraged. We’d all worked so hard to get her this far, to where she truly felt she was a member of our family, appellations aside. As for my husband, I worried that he too might withdraw into paranoia from days long gone, paranoia he’d struggled with considerable success to bury. I knew he would share with me what Henry Slader—if indeed it was Slader who’d accosted Maisie—had delivered in this coercive, cryptic way, once he’d had time to digest the tectonic shift that had just unsettled our placid lives. I rose, put my hand on his shoulder, told him I’d shut the first-floor windows and lock up, then left him alone as the string quartet flowed on, a whisper of empty encouragement from a distant century.
When I went to secure the screen door on the front porch, I saw someone stirring on the far side of the road, just beyond the perimeter of light. No body was visible to my eyes, just the vaguest nimbus of a face afloat out there like an illusionist’s trick in a blackened theater. I was reminded of lonely No-Face in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, or those enigmatic flat-faced Cycladic sculptures I loved to see whenever we visited the Met. But this wasn’t some anime film figure staring at me or an ancient visage carved from limestone. It was palpably real, gradually withdrawing into the woods, never looking away.
My natural impulse was to call out, demand an explanation. But I didn’t dare. For one, my family had been through enough tonight. What was more, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. As the gaze that was fixed between me and the mystifying face continued for a troubling minute, maybe longer, I realized Maisie was right. The face’s features, however ambiguous and shadowy in what postdusk light remained, resembled those of my brother, Adam, dead these twenty-two years. Murdered and laid to rest without his killer’s ever having been brought to justice.
Impossible. Ghosts were for children and dime novelists. But this apparition was real, and my mind was not playing ghoulish tricks on me. Was the face, so rigid, slightly smiling as Maisie had said? Did I hear soft laughter, or was it the whispering breeze that ruffled the maple leaves and pine needles? I glanced behind me to see if the sound might have come from the hallway. No one was there. And when I turned back again to look across the yard, the face had vanished. Ignoring any fears I felt, I ventured outside and down the steps, where I hesitated by Maisie’s bicycle, clutching the newel post at the foot of the railing. Blinking hard, hoping to see something further, I realized the visitation, or whatever had just happened, was over. I looked up toward the stars, but none were visible. The overcast sky promised rain by dawn.
After lingering another moment, I returned inside, locked the doors, extinguished the porch light, and went upstairs to bed. It wasn’t until the following afternoon, when curiosity drove me out across the front yard in my slicker and into the wooded thicket on the far side of the lane, that I discovered evidence I’d not been hallucinating. An oversize black-and-white headshot of Adam lay propped against the trunk of an ash tree, its eyes neatly and nightmarishly cut out and an elastic string fixed on either side so it could be worn as a mask. Unthinking, I wrapped my arms around myself as if taken by a sudden, fierce chill. This image was one I’d never seen before. My brother looked relaxed, carefree, happier than in most photos of him as an adult. It seemed to have been taken in the last year of his life, given the pronounced crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes and the deep wrinkles on his forehead. I was afraid to touch the photo mask—it looked like a freakish religious talisman out here among the tiny wildflowers, club moss, and orchard grasses beneath the shimmering canopy of damp leaves.