The woman pinches her red lips as if sucking on a lemon. “Another Wakefield, I suppose.”
Scornfully, Elizabeth replies, “I’m not a Wakefield anymore.” Then, as soon as the words have tumbled from her mouth, her face goes ice-cold and still; I can see the realization blooming in real time. If a divorce is imminent, then will she be a Wakefield again? Will she revert to her maiden name? Who will she be, she wonders? Elizabeth Hill or Elizabeth Wakefield?
We are Wakefields, all of us, even in this patriarchal world. Even when my mother was married to my father, she kept her name, and they debated long and hard over which name their daughters would take, eventually settling on my mother’s family name, allowing us to inherit a lineage that would otherwise be lost to time and X chromosomes. Perhaps it does not matter, anyway. Perhaps the Wakefield name will die with us after all. It is so hard to keep a thing like that alive.
Maybe the house will keep it alive for us.
* * *
When I first came to stay with my mother, my intentions were for a short-term lease. A few weeks, perhaps, to regain my equilibrium. A month at best.
I should have known: once this house has you, it doesn’t let you go.
I slept on Liz and Don’s couch for about a month after I was mugged. Each night sleep tugged gently at me like television static, and just as I let my eyes slip closed, a windblown shutter would beat against the window, or a neighbor’s dog would bark to be let out, and I would snap awake and lie wide-eyed in the dark with my ears attuned to every minute noise that crept or cracked or whispered: the hiss of a passing car, the rustling of a bothered tree outside, or perhaps the patter of footsteps, some stranger stealing onto the porch, rattling a lock pick until the handle of the front door jiggled metallically, and the creak of the door swinging open, and that pungent odor of musk and sweat and my cheek pressed into the cement and the gun pressed into my neck—
Unable to take it, I would rise from the couch, check all the locks, make sure the windows were closed, and then, wired with nervous energy, I would spend the next several hours straightening up the house: pairing shoes and lining them side by side against the wall, alphabetically organizing DVDs, putting empty glasses in the dishwasher—and once I was so bored and fidgety that I moved all the furniture in the living room four inches to the left, just to see if they would notice in the morning.
Surprisingly, they didn’t care for my midnight labors.
One morning, when Don was getting himself set up at his rig to work, he started digging through the drawers of his desk with increasingly sharp movements, until he yelled out, “Where the hell are my headphones?”
I had to retrieve them from wherever it was I had placed them the night before during one of my shambling, zombie-eyed organizing sprees, and he snatched them from my hands. “You shouldn’t put things where they don’t belong,” he snapped, before closing the headphones over his ears.
Often I would catch a few hours of sleep close to dawn, when I had exhausted myself silly with all the nighttime working. But until then, I got to know that house intimately, saw into all its secret shadowed places that Don and Liz never saw, as they tended to sleep through the night. Until that last night, of course.
It was sometime after midnight and I was lying awake, running through possible tasks in my mind to see if I could fall asleep just by imagining I was doing something, when inevitably there was a petulant creak, which at first I chalked up to the house settling. But when I tried to go back to my mental exercise, there was the creak again, this time unmistakably the sound of a footstep, weight shifting on the floorboards.
Someone was in the house.
My breath caught in my throat as I listened to the slow, heavy footsteps creeping down the hallway, footsteps that didn’t belong there. I tried to remember if I had checked all the windows and doors that night, but I couldn’t recall doing so, and let’s face it, Don and Liz were fairly careless with that sort of thing, so who knows, there could have been a wide-open invitation somewhere for an intruder looking to steal inside. My gut twisted, sick with dread.
I reached out and felt around the coffee table to the left of the couch until my hand met the cold glass encasing of a candle. It smelled cloyingly of apples and spice, some heady autumn scent, and I pulled the heavy candle close to me as I sat up. On fleet, silent feet, I prowled over to the hallway and lay in wait for the figure’s passing. When the shape of him stepped out of the hall and into the living room, I shouted and swung the candle.
The man cried out and doubled over, one hand on his left eye, and with a sinking feeling somewhere beneath my furious heart, I recognized the sound of his voice.
“What the hell?”
The hall light blinked on as Elizabeth came stumbling out in her pajamas, hair mussed with sleep. “What is going on?”
Don straightened, still holding a palm over his injured eye. The candle lay somewhere on the floor.
“What were you doing?” I demanded, my voice rising defensively.
“I was going for a smoke,” he confessed, and sure enough, he had a pack of cigarettes in his hand.
“Damn it, Don,” said Elizabeth. “Are you smoking again?”
When he finally pulled his hand away from his eye, we saw the purple blooming over the swelling lid. It was lucky he didn’t lose the eye. His brow ridge absorbed the worst of the blow, leaving him with a ghastly black bruise and a burst blood vessel that turned the white of his eye red.
I was lucky, too. They didn’t press charges, didn’t even want me to cover the medical bills. They just wanted me to leave.
Perhaps it was time to go home, but when I thought of home, I didn’t think of that lonely apartment I had been living in for the last several years; I thought of the mansion on the edge of the swamp with its proliferation of rooms and towering bookshelves. And even though I intended to go back to my apartment, truly I did, when I started my car and crawled away from their suburban bungalow, I imagined myself settling into bed that evening alone, surrounded by the darkness within and the darkness without, figures creeping around outside my windows, shadows with nothing visible but the whites of their eyes, breaking through the front door, stealing into my apartment, pushing me to the floor, pressing death to the back of my neck. Before I knew it, I was driving in the other direction.
I drove up the winding roads, through hilly forests and leafy vales, and when I arrived at the house, it welcomed me as if I had never left.
My mother, answering the door, looked at me like a stranger. She opened it only a crack, giving me a slivered view of her wary eyeball.
“Yes?” she said.
The porch light wasn’t on. All was dark, and I a shadow.
“Mom,” I said.
She flipped the switch, and the low yellow light buzzed to life.
When I stepped in, she padded away in her slippers to fix some tea. I brought in my things, and from the foyer I heard the distant murmur of her talking to someone in the kitchen. By this time, my mother had been living alone for nearly ten years, ever since her youngest child flew the coop for college and other worlds—her only company the house itself and whatever it deigned to offer her.
When the teakettle started screaming, I found the kitchen abandoned and the kettle rattling with a volcanic expulsion of steam, which only calmed when I shut off the burner and went searching through the labyrinth to find where she had gone.