I find myself a granola bar and sit at the table across from the boy to watch. Though his head remains bent forward, I can see that he looks sickly, insipid. His eyes are two dark smears of charcoal in the darkness and his nose juts to a sharp aristocratic point; that is all that I can make of his face. I’d like to ask him who he is, but we cannot interact through the span of time. He is a memory; I am not here to him. He would neither see nor hear me. I am an invisible observer.
His fingers find the bird’s tiny heaving chest, and he caresses the soft black feathers with fingers that look clumsy but strive to be delicate and adroit. The tender moonlight puts me in a state of calm, and I understand why it is so easy for Mother to get caught up in the past.
He begins tugging gently on the feathers, lifting them to see what lies beneath, to see what secrets they hide. The bird struggles vainly. His tugging grows more insistent. What is he doing? What is he looking for? He yanks hard on a feather, which snaps free, and he brings it close to his night-blurred face, inspecting the fine black filaments curiously, scientifically, before letting it go and watching it drift and twirl back to the table, where it settles among the other feathers.
The granola goes dry in my mouth and I find it hard to swallow. How dare you, I want to tell him. How dare you. It is a poor, injured creature, and just because you are bigger than it does not give you the right to be cruel.
The boy continues to divest the bird of its patchy coat of feathers, and more and more skin shows through. He plucks them one by one while the pitiful creature lies prone, its black eyes staring dementedly at the ceiling through the pain of its denuding.
“Stop it,” I whisper, horrified, repulsed, even knowing the boy cannot hear me.
He hesitates with his fingers on the next feather, his head cocked as if listening, but the moment passes and he finishes his plucking. He does this methodically, with neither malice nor anger but with a clinical detachment.
When the bird is fully stripped, retaining only a few pitiful tufts here and there, I see what the boy sees, what the boy perhaps wanted to see all along: a scrawny wretched creature that hardly looks like a bird anymore at all but instead like some hideous alien from whose frightful skull bulge round black eyes and a predacious beak. I should feel sorry for the bird, but now I can feel only repulsed by the ugly thing it is. I want it to go away, to die, not to have existed in the first place, for how can such a lovely bird look so hideous in its naked skin? It is not at all like a proud tree shed of its autumnal cloak, stark and spindly; it is sad, vile, unnatural.
The boy takes one mangled wing and breaks it with a sharp little snap. Awful sounds issue from that beak, sounds I have never heard from a bird before. Holding the beak shut as if to quiet the thing, he breaks the other wing.
“Stop it,” I say again, and lunge forward, but my own hand passes through air. They are mere echoes, untouchable. Whatever has happened in this moment cannot be changed.
When it seems the boy has grown bored with the bird, he drops it to the floor and stomps. I hear the crunch and creep slowly around the table, expecting to come around the edge and see the pulverized corpse flattened into gory pulp on the floor, but before I can see it, the bird and the boy are gone and I am alone in the kitchen.
I wonder when this boy was here, how long ago. Was he a Wakefield? And if so, are we all doomed to evil and cruelty, like Mad Catherine—are we cursed to be horrible people? Is that just who we are? Some of us had to be good. The Quakers, they were good. I tell myself this as I back out of the kitchen, tell myself that I can be good, too.
The house feels darker. Unsettled. Beyond the window in the overgrown yard, the girls are playing again, framed this time by the moon and their laughter now sounding of the night, of mystery and malediction, playing on an endless repeating loop. Where is their mother now? My mother, the Agnes of the present, is upstairs asleep. But what about the “now” that these echoes inhabit? Why is the Agnes of my childhood never present when current Agnes sits watching memories of the past?
The Agnes of my childhood is in the library, sunk into an armchair and leaned back to where the thin light cannot catch her face. She is drinking brandy from a tumbler with melting ice and contemplating the bookshelves with detached passivity. The half-empty bottle sits near her feet. She is there when the girls come inside, and from there she yells at them to slow down, not to stomp, not to make so much goddamn noise, and her nerves unravel with each giggle and shout and childish footfall. Elizabeth wants to keep playing, for she is a queen and Sam is a peasant in this game, but Sam wants to read a story and so she creeps into the dim library, knowing better than to startle her mother.
She stops in the doorway.
“What do you want?” says Agnes.
“A book.” She goes to a shelf and picks one out. “Will you read to me?”
“You know how to read. You’re not a baby anymore.”
Sam hugs the heavy book to her chest. She looks hesitantly at the other armchair.
“Go read somewhere else. I’m busy,” says Agnes. Sam doesn’t move. Tears glisten on Agnes’s cheeks. “I said go somewhere else. Are you deaf?”
“Do I make you sad?” Sam asks hesitantly.
Agnes allows the tears to drain unchecked down her cheeks. Her eyes are glassy and unfocused. She has arrived at an emotional stasis where the tears arrive with no sound, no hitched breath. They exist like two small indifferent rivers gouging valleys down her face.
“No,” she says at last. “You don’t make me anything.”
I pass the now empty, night-blanketed library and its silent sleeping books and feel myself like a ghost wandering the halls of this ancient manor. Are they the ghosts, truly, or am I?
* * *
Come morning, Elizabeth makes a proposal over coffee. Mother brewed only decaf, for her, and I imagine I will be made to feel interminably tired for a month to come, half dozing even in my waking hours. My notebook sits before me, filled with scrawlings of our family history—both what I have uncovered from old records and what I have seen here myself. Who is the boy? I am determined to identify him, add him to my collection of history.
Hands wrapped around the warm mug that steams into her face, Elizabeth says, “I need to get everything figured out for the birth, now that things have changed. Mom, will you come with me for my ultrasound appointment?” She punctuates the last sentence with a sip.
Mother looks at her with surprise. “Oh honey, I’m not sure you need me to go. Why don’t I just take care of things around here?”
I don’t know why Elizabeth deliberately prods us in our tender spots. It seems callous to continue poking a wound just because you can see it. She must have known what Mother’s response would be.
She purses her lips and places her mug on the table with barely contained resentment. “I can’t do this alone.” Then she sits very still.
“Why don’t you take Sam?”
Elizabeth laughs rudely. “You won’t even be there for the birth, will you?”
“Well,” says Agnes. “Have you considered home birth?”
“No doctors? No nurses? No epidural? No thanks. Besides”—she waves her hand dismissively—“that sounds so archaic.”
“You know we’re here for you, Lizzie.”