The kettle squeals sooner than I anticipate, as I have some trouble telling time. It slips away from me here and there, quickly now and slow again, like running water—perhaps from living so long in a haunted house.
When I bring out the tea, Mother and Elizabeth have settled themselves in the drawing room. All these rooms have old names. If it were a modern home, there likely would be only the living, the dining, the kitchen, the bathrooms, and the bedrooms; but here in this monstrosity of a manse, built piecemeal over the course of many years in which the previous owners—well, my ancestors, mad, the lot of them—kept adding on as if to confuse the ghosts that live here, there are simply too many rooms not to have names for each of them, or else how would you ever find each other? That is why this old dark maze has also a parlor, a drawing room, a billiards room, a library, a stone tower room, a reading room, a den, and the Rose Room, named—shall I hazard a guess?—for the putrid floral carpet and the pink velvet draperies, and all the old ornate furniture in there that has been around, good lord, since the Victorian era.
When I return with the tea, my mother is asking my sister the particulars of her departure from her husband, but Elizabeth is uncharacteristically tight-lipped on the matter. True to form, however, with her attentive listeners, she proceeds to divulge a litany of general complaints: “He never wanted to get married—you remember, he dragged his feet like a child. He didn’t want to be a father. Or he could never decide. He blamed me for getting pregnant.” Angry tears glisten and run over. “He said I should have gotten an abortion!”
“That man,” says my mother, shaking her head. “Well, it’s good you came home. You stay as long as you like. Sam, won’t it be nice to have your sister here? And a baby!” Her eyes catch on Elizabeth, whose face is a mask of despair. “You know, Lizzie, this might be a blessing in disguise. Why don’t I consult the cards?”
“God, Mom, no,” groans Elizabeth. “Can’t we behave like normal people for once?”
Mother hides her frown behind the mug of chamomile. “Needs lemon.” She bustles off to the kitchen, leaving us alone, two strangers who once spent sixteen years of our lives together, with only each other for companionship in this lonely place.
“How long, you think, before she asks to read my palm?” Elizabeth murmurs.
“Well, it won’t hurt if you just let her.”
“What else should I have expected?” she says, more to herself than to me. She has a habit of speaking to herself aloud in front of me as if I’m not there, but also with the full intention of me hearing whatever it is she wants to say. If not, she would just think it like the rest of us.
“So,” she says, as if realizing we are alone, now, for the first time since I left her house after my brief stay with her and Don and moved back here.
As happens sometimes with sisters, once we were adults and no longer lived in the same house, Elizabeth and I became fond friends, with the kind of connection fostered only between turbulent sisters. We met up regularly for coffee and gossip, or lunch while reading movie reviews, or drinks and card games.
It was a system that suited both of us, these weekly visits, until one evening when two drinks at the bar turned into four. I suggested, half joking, that we were both turning into our mother the older we got; that made her angry. She was nothing like Agnes Wakefield, and I had better be grateful for that. I didn’t see why I should be. Our sniping took us onto the curb in the valley between streetlights, and I told her she could pretend to be something else, but she had always been a rotten bitch to me, ever since we were children.
“If I’m such a bitch,” she said, fishing her keys out of her purse, “then you can find your own ride home.”
I watched the taillights of her car shrink away in the darkness. Trees closed in the country road, and she was gone.
As I pulled out my cell phone to call for a ride, it slipped from my unfeeling fingers and skittered across the pavement. Such a brief moment. How many times have I dropped my phone and reached over to retrieve it—something you hardly even think about, it’s such a natural act.
But I was drunk, and I did not notice the person coming up behind me.
When I bent down for the phone, there was a sharp crack on the back of my head. I fell forward, landing badly on my wrist—felt a knee in my back, tried to push away the stranger, but he was too heavy. I could not turn to look at him, so he remained a mystery, a dark weight on my back, reminding me of my own shadow as a child, the ghost who used to follow me around, the tall shape of seething darkness, although perhaps darkness is not quite the right word—not necessarily darkness but nothingness, a shape of nothingness sometimes glimpsed standing at the top of a staircase or the end of a hallway. The Nothing Man, who even my mother never believed existed. And that, I thought in that wild moment, was who knelt on my back, the Nothing Man, and if I did ever manage to turn my head, I would see the terrible emptiness of him.
As if he sensed my thoughts, his hot breath in my ear said, “Don’t try to get up.” Of course I tried, but a hand pushed my head down, pressed my cheek into the gritty asphalt, and I felt the chilling circle, a mouth of metal, press into my neck.
Time sagged. Wind stirred litter and dead leaves across the empty street. Dirt migrated from my lips, mashed against the ground, into my mouth. A beetle crawled across the asphalt near my right eye, its wiry legs twitching. The knee in my back was a sharp weight crushing my gut. I smelled my own alcoholic sweat and a man’s sour musk blanketing me.
My purse was yanked from my shoulder, and with my hair spilling over my eyes, I heard only the sounds of careless rummaging. He took what he wanted, tossed the empty bag to the ground, where it flopped like a dead fish, an empty and forsaken thing.
“Please don’t kill me,” I prayed into the asphalt.
It was eternity before the cold weight of the gun vanished from my neck.
“Don’t try to get up,” he said again, and then the knee was gone as well.
I gasped in dizzy lungfuls of air, hardly aware how much life his knee had choked from my chest, and I waited until his footsteps receded, never looking up, never turning to see his true form. I waited until a lonely car or two blew past on the street. I waited until someone else emerged from the bar and presumed me drunkenly passed out and stepped over me.
He hadn’t taken my cell phone, because it had slid away in the dark. He took only my wallet. What small miracles we are granted.
The police dropped me off at my apartment, but I couldn’t bear to go inside where I would be alone in the dark. When I finally did, and locked the door, and pulled a chair in front of it, and removed the chair to check again that the door was locked, even then, even with the barricade, sleep eluded me, chased away by every rattle of the loose windowpanes and every scratch of wind.
Elizabeth was full of apologies. In one of them, an invitation to stay with her for a while managed to sneak, perhaps unintentionally, past her lips.
How long has it been since I stayed with them? A year, perhaps? At times it feels like only a few days since I moved back home; sometimes it feels like I have never left at all, that everything beyond these walls has never truly existed.
I look up at Elizabeth. It seems strange to see her here; she hardly ever visits. I wonder how permanent her stay will be.