“How on earth was I supposed to know that was going to happen?” she replies, her voice rising indignantly. “You can’t blame me for not predicting the future.”
She finishes her wine in one long pull, slams the glass down on the table so hard I’m surprised when it doesn’t shatter, and pushes herself to her feet in what is supposed to be a sharp rise but turns into a laborious toddle. “Anyway, you’re an adult now. It isn’t my job to take care of you. Frankly, it never was. But I did it anyway, because Mom wouldn’t. You can’t expect me to look out for you forever.” Her eyes are iron. “Making up stories for attention won’t make me feel sorry for you. Poor, neglected Sam. Always has to have some invented problem. Well, some of us have real problems.”
She stalks away before I can think of anything to say.
4
Elizabeth has locked me out of her life now, refusing to talk to me.
I have made myself an enemy, and now she will defy me in her spite, retracing her childhood footsteps of rebellion, which always came so easily to her and so hard to me. Rebelling against Mother, against the house, against the quiet.
She used to do this to me when we were kids, sometimes even quite literally locking me out of the house.
Once, when I was fifteen, I stayed out late with my study group, and when I returned the house was dark, dormant, the front door locked. They were supposed to leave it open for me, but Elizabeth and I had been fighting that day, and I knew she must have crept downstairs and locked the door at some point to get back at me. I circumnavigated the house, tried the back door, tapped on forbidding windows. I looked up to the second floor, begging for a light to shine through the draperies—Mother awake reading, Elizabeth sulking in her princess bed. Their rooms were dark.
Moonlight made a mystical landscape of the swamp, which seemed to whisper its mysteries to me, saying, Don’t worry if you can’t get in there, the swamp is always open, we’ll let you in. Why I thought the swamp might want me to wander, lost, through its narrow creeks and sorrowful trees must have been the fanciful workings of an overactive teenage mind, one fraught with the anxiety of being trapped out in the darkness, barred from home, from the grace of light.
I went around picking up small pebbles—small enough, I hoped, that they wouldn’t damage the old windows, which even then had seen better days. Feeling like a cliché—I am a boy who is in love with a girl but we are only sixteen so I will throw pebbles at her window—I tossed my little prizes here, and here, but my aim was terrible. One of the pebbles flew off course and hit the window overlooking the back corner of the house. The only one that is truly inaccessible from the inside: the window of the locked room.
A heavy curtain hangs there, never touched, never opened, leaving the window perpetually black even in broadest daylight. But then, one can hardly tell the difference from any other room. All the house feels encased, enclosed, with its heavy draperies pulled over each orifice as if to keep the outside world out.
What a fool was I, wasting a pebble on entirely the wrong window.
But then, of all things—the curtain moved.
At first I thought it must be a trick of the moonlight, the swamplight, that strange eerie glow that inhabits the darklands of the country, a glow that’s likely just the eye trying frantically to see in such nonlight where there is nothing to refract against the pupil, where everything looks grainy and strange no matter how desperately you squint, as things fuzz and fray and disappear, pursued relentlessly by the failing eye. But it was no mistake. The curtain’s dark sensual curves fluttered and began to draw back to one side.
The heart-stopping sight flooded me with terrible anticipation—there was someone in the locked room.
It could not be my mother or Elizabeth, I reasoned, since neither of them had the key, the lost key, the long-gone key.
There was someone else in the locked room.
Thrilled with this new fear, I suddenly lost the old one; being locked out was not so awful after all, even out here in the darkness, for at least I was out here, at least there lay a solid windowpane between me and whoever, whatever, was drawing back that black curtain with its bony fingers, whereas my sleeping mother and sister were inside, locked in there with it.
I wish I could describe to you the face that loomed out of the empty dark within, but I could not make it out from below, and the moonlight was too afraid to touch whatever lingered in that lonely room, leaving me with only the vague impression of a face with pits for eyes, like a demon.
In a moment, the curtain swished back into place and went still.
And then I was at the front door. I was pounding desperately, madly, to be let in. I was hesitating with my fist an inch from the wood, abruptly terrified to be let in, wanting in that sick moment to remain out in the familiar confusing dark, perhaps to go live in the swamp now, away from the house, when the door opened, and my mother ushered me inside with a mixture of irritability and fondness, assumed my panic was at being locked out. She made me an indifferent cup of tea and went back to bed.
I don’t know how long I sat in that kitchen, clutching the mug of cold dregs, trying to convince myself to move, to ascend the stairs, to get to my room where I could cower beneath the covers like a child.
Eventually I did.
I never liked to see the memories at night—something in their ghostly appearance has always unsettled me during the moonlit hours—but then I saw, inexplicably, my father, just standing there cleaning his glasses. Seeing him gave me a warm rush of relief, enough so that when he vanished, I had the courage to run upstairs.
By the next morning, in the light of day, it all felt like a dream, and eventually I came to the conclusion that I had imagined the figure. But perhaps it did not matter whether I had imagined it, for the room was locked and no matter how many times I pressed my ear against the door, I never heard a thing.
* * *
In the morning I frantically, belatedly iron out my lessons for the week, trying to catch Elizabeth’s eye as she lumbers past. I’ve planted myself in the drawing room, a book spread out on the table before me, the drapes pulled open to let in a bit of light. She ignores me.
My mother is upstairs, picking through dusty boxes of old toys and blankets from when Elizabeth and I were children. I had to come downstairs after trying to work in my room, because every so often she would appear in the doorway holding up two stuffed animals worn wretched with age and ask me what I thought. “For Julian,” she said when I only stared, dumbfounded, and it was all I could do not to tell her we shouldn’t give him any animals, even fake ones, not if he’s going to destroy them, like the bird. I bit my tongue, shrugged, thinking my silence would protect her. Eventually I could no longer take her constant interruptions.
Julian, I think, why will you turn out so cruel? What is it that could produce such a disturbing child?
I shiver, feeling trapped by the question, and wonder how long it will take him to pick up a knife for the first time, crawl his way to my room in the middle of the night, and beg for his auntie to let him in to play.
Elizabeth comes into the room again without looking at me and picks up a set of headphones, plugging them first into her phone and then into her ears, the better to ignore me with.
I always had the sense that Elizabeth was afraid of the cold depths of silence, and afraid of being alone—the silence of loneliness. She has always tried to fill the world with bright sounds, sought out distractions, noise, delightful chaos. Her most memorable rebellion against the eternal tomblike quiet of Wakefield Manor came when she was thirteen, loud, talkative, restless; she brought home a yard-sale mint-green Fender Strat, a junky guitar with warped strings she did not know to replace and pick scratches from unrestrained clumsy strumming. As soon as she plugged it into the cheap amplifier she’d picked up, she started playing feral nonsense—dissonant nonchords of the purest teenage rage. After a day or two they morphed into actual chords as she started to learn by reading tabs, and soon she was playing punk rock that echoed throughout the house as yet another seeming anachronism that lived there.