I am thinking now not of her child but of mine, the one that never was. I was young and didn’t know how to say no to my date, who was also young and stupid and thought I was on birth control. So much for Elizabeth thinking I never got any. I never told her. Even though I was only eighteen, I knew immediately that I didn’t want it, would never want it—him or the baby. Without ever showing him the pregnancy test or returning his calls, I quietly found a clinic and took a taxi there. They tell you that when you leave the clinic you will feel guilty, depressed, empty. Perhaps you will feel like a murderer. Perhaps you will feel unwomaned. The exact horror Elizabeth imagined when her husband told her to get rid of it. I expected to feel ill and ashamed, but all I felt as I walked out into the sun-brightened parking lot still glazed with fresh morning rain was relief. Relief and a lightness, as if I was finally myself for the first time in weeks, as if my treacherous body belonged to me again.
Elizabeth places both hands reverently on her belly. “We’re going to name him Julian.”
2
I have never slept well. Tonight is no exception.
Rather than lying in bed while sleep recedes from me like a boat pulled away by the tide, I get up and wander on restless feet. I don’t even need to turn on the television or grab a book; the house will entertain me.
For all that has ever been, the house remembers.
It is a house haunted by memory; it digests us, all of us, and spits us out again at random. I have seen my younger self from the corner of my eye, just a flash stealing through a doorway and then gone. But I have also seen those who lived in the house before us, the Wakefields of yesteryear.
As I creep past the Rose Room, I glance in to see a familiar ghost: Frances Wakefield, bedridden and gaunt with tuberculosis.
She lived in the nineteenth century, the ailing wife of a mild-mannered patriarch, Everett, and mother to two children: adventurous daughter Constance and evangelical son August. They were Quakers, which I have found out by piecing together snippets of their story told by echoes, voices of the long dead; ephemeral glimpses that have appeared to me out of order. I’ve tried to jot down the details and rearrange them until the chronology fits, my own little portrait of the house’s history.
But seeing Frances on the verge of death makes my skin crawl. Her breathing had grown so labored that one could almost hear a ghost of it all throughout the house, the incessant groaning rattle of liquid in her lungs.
I back away from the doorway and nearly into the ghosts of her family.
Constance, thirteen or thereabouts, is cradling a cup of tarry water, filled to the brim. Blonde hair spills out from her bonnet. Her dress is wrinkled, and she is barefoot. Clearly Constance was not very adept at the household duties she had to take over for her mother; I have seen her prick her finger while mending clothes so many times that I imagine her small digits must be pocked as a pincushion.
Before she makes it to the doorway with the cup, her brother, August, stops her with a heavy grip on her shoulder. She glares at him over the cup as the water sloshes dangerously close to its lip.
“I’ll not see thee out there again.”
“Out where?” she asks with feigned innocence.
His eyes narrow on the cup of water. “I know where that came from. If you will not obey Father, then hark to me: do not be foolish.”
Constance frowns. “You’ve been to the swamp a dozen or more times. Why shan’t I?”
“Sakes alive, Constance, ’tis dangerous, that is why!” August lowers his voice. “You know that I go into the swamp to help those people because Father wants to help them. If it were up to me, I would not set one foot in that terrible place.”
I know who he is talking about. At the time, there were secret communities that lived in the swamp called maroons—escaped slaves forced to dwell in a place where no one else dared tread. Life in the swamp was a hard, toiling existence, with land too liquid for extensive farming or comfortable dwellings; one feels the heaviness of the air like a hot, wet cloak, infested with ravening mosquitoes and pressing one down into the sucking, sinking morass. These natural defenses kept out intruders but forced the maroons into a prison of their own devising—a deadly sort of freedom.
The Wakefields, with their home at the swamp’s edge, had helped fleeing slaves make their way into its depths, guiding the refugees by night.
“Not even to save Mother?”
August looks at the door hanging ajar on its hinges; perhaps he can smell the sickness within.
When he doesn’t respond, Constance continues, growing bolder, “The water of the swamp is said to have healing properties. If I only get her to drink—”
August’s face grows livid as he slaps the cup from her hands. It clatters to the floor, spilling a puddle of dirty water.
Constance opens her mouth in defiance, but she withers at the look on her brother’s face and the coldness in his voice when he says, “Nothing will save her.”
I do not stay to watch her clean up the mess.
Constance is not the only one who has ever felt the swamp’s strange allure. What is it about things that horrify us that simultaneously attracts us? Like moths drawn to their own demise by candlelight, unable to look away from the burning beauty even as we draw closer, so close our flesh melts and sloughs off. The swamp, shrouded in heavy mists and the odors of decay that conceal lurking predators and invisible quicksand, should warn all to stay away. This is a bad place, the swamp communicates to us. Do not enter. So what is that voice underneath the warning, entreating us to see it for ourselves? What is this siren song of the swamp? Why is it that we fancy ghost stories that raise the hair on the backs of our necks?
I walk down the old wooden staircase, through a house that looks much as it did in Frances’s time. One reason we haven’t changed things much over the years—no remodeling, an adherence to old furniture positioned in just the right places—is so that we do not become disoriented when suddenly a room decides to rearrange itself into its past formation, to show us a memory it has dredged up. The house is sufficiently disorienting as it is. Rooms inside rooms like nesting dolls; an intersection of two identical hallways, confounding the unwary traveler who neglected to bring his compass. All thanks to Mad Catherine, of course, my great-great-great-great something or other, who built this mausolean monstrosity.
The house is a nonsensical place, but if you keep to the main areas, you might never understand how strange it is; it is only when you explore further into the recesses that you begin to realize, with a sense of mounting dread, that the house just goes on and on, intending to confuse and disorient, and as you try to find your way out, confused and disoriented yourself, you cannot help but wonder if you are merely going in deeper, toward the heart of the house, wherever that may be, where, one can only assume, the Minotaur lives.
I find myself heading into the kitchen, thinking I might rummage through the cabinets for something to eat, when I spot another ghost. It is a boy of eight or nine, sitting at the kitchen table. I do not recognize him. The moon in the window silhouettes the boy’s frame in pale light. His back is to me, and at first all I see is dark unruly hair, his head bent down to examine some treasure.
What is it? I creep around until I can make it out. Upon the table lies a crippled blackbird shifting its broken wings feebly. Detached feathers make a soft bed around it. I wonder what has happened to the poor creature and how the boy ministering to it plans to help. His hands hover over the ailing bird, as if he is unsure of what to do.