“Are you?” she snaps, untethering her anger from wherever it was fastened.
Elizabeth stands up so suddenly that her chair slides across the tile with a screech, and I am amazed that someone so pregnant can move so fast. “You won’t die if you set foot outside this house.” She shakes her head in disgust. “You’ve never come to visit me. Not once. You didn’t even come to my baby shower. How do I explain that to people? My own mother. I started telling my friends you were dead. Did you know that?”
“Keep your voice down, please,” Mother says tersely. “Is this a conversation you want to remember?”
Elizabeth tilts her head back and screams incoherently, just to spite her. Then she fixes Mother with a cold stare. “I don’t care.”
“That’s enough. Go to your room.”
“I’m thirty years old!” The shriek is so high-pitched it becomes nearly unintelligible. She clutches at the air as if looking for something to grab on to. Her hair dances frantically on her shaking head and her eyes glint madly. At last she gives a sound like an angry bull and storms from the room, her maternity shirt billowing around her like a curtain troubled by furious wind.
Mother carefully pours a spoonful of sugar into her coffee. “I know how old she is,” she says.
We finish our coffee in silence. Outside, birds flit hither and yon in the naked trees and chirp their disinterest in human affairs. I observe my mother carefully. She looks small, plucked clean.
* * *
A girl in an old-fashioned dress dusts the little-used dining room. She hums to herself a heartful tune, but her eyes are sad. Whatever dust there is now on the china cabinet remains. I think I recognize her, but it’s too late to place who it is. She is gone before the tune fully dissipates.
My grandmother now stands there, holding a glass and gazing into its depths with profound concentration as if willing it to reveal the secrets of life.
The past is everywhere, here, wrapped up in the present.
It is the past that intrigues me; I am afflicted with an obsession for history. Teaching archaeology allows me to slide easily into the past until I find myself missing it achingly, feeling a kind of nostalgia for a time before I was born. I feel almost as though I can touch an artifact from the past and transport myself there, which is why I collect small tokens from around the house that feel imbued with meaning or history, or both. It isn’t, after all, as if time is quite as fixed as everyone else would have you believe. At least, not here it isn’t.
I would very much like to go on an official archaeological dig in the swamp, if I could get the funding. I could be the foremost expert on the secret communities that used to live there, reading into a tiny bit of polished stone all manner of tools and meals it helped create. But for now I focus on sharing this peculiar joy with my students: enjoying the slow easy lull of old documents with their baroque prose that implies no one is in any hurry to get anywhere but to the next lovely phrase, the look on students’ faces when they begin to understand the subjectivity of the past, of reality itself, of how stories create our reality. But I wonder: is the house an objective source? Are the memories here perfect reconstructions of reality, or are they filtered through the house’s perception the way all memories are filtered through our brains, the way I am reconstructing this story for you?
So how can I find out who the boy was, if I can’t trust my own eyes?
I fear what it must be like to forget the past, like my grandparents. My mother’s parents were both plagued with early-onset dementia. In a house that constantly relives what came before, they must have seen versions of themselves doing things they could no longer recall, strange beings wearing their own flesh. Darling, did we argue on the night of our twentieth anniversary? Did I make you sleep on the couch? Let’s watch and find out. Make some popcorn. Even the smaller gestures—putting away dishes in a certain order, a moment of indecision in the library with a hand hovering over the spines of potential books, a sharp word on a gloomy evening—must have seemed so poignantly foreign that they questioned whether or not they knew themselves at all. Imagine that life. Familiarity become unfamiliar.
Eventually they decided it best, when they were lucid enough to discuss their options, to stay in an assisted facility. Agnes was still young at the time and had only just met the man she would soon marry. She was an obstetrician, living in a cramped little apartment across town.
When they had Elizabeth, they decided to move into Agnes’s family home, where they would have plenty of space to raise children. What did he think when they first crept down the long drive through the broken iron gate? You come up past the ugly cherubic statues shaggy with undergrowth and moss, past the Virginia creeper and wisteria, and you see, emerging from the earth, the sprawling Gothic eyesore where terrible angles meet at sharp and angry glances like an unhappy jigsaw. You see the house, crumbling and perverse, with its brooding walls and secretive windows, grown over with vines as if the earth should reclaim it.
But even beyond that, I wonder what my father’s reaction was the first time he saw the ghost of a former resident facing him in the hallway or the light of a candle as someone centuries ago lit their nightly way.
When I was six and Elizabeth eight, he killed himself.
* * *
Elizabeth has shut herself up in her childhood room. A teenager stands in the hallway outside the closed door.
Though he is older now, of a stature that signifies a recent growth spurt that he hasn’t yet filled out, he retains the aquiline nose, the spectral moon-washed features overcast by thick dark hair, his face still somehow indistinct, unformed.
Who is this faceless boy? I can make out the dark pockets for eyes and the protruding nose, but that is it, and it makes for a disturbing image, like a photograph that was blurred in the taking, turning your once-familiar friend into a smudged ghoul with a jagged black scar for a mouth and impenetrable holes for eyes. But reality is not a photograph. Is it that the house cannot remember his face? Is this the way we imagine people whose features we can’t quite recall? Like my father—if I think very hard, I can vaguely remember his looks, but would my memory reconstructed into life be accurate, or would it contain gaping holes, ghostly blurs where there ought to be defined lines? No, that is impossible; I have seen memories here that are too old for me to remember, older even than my mother and my grandmother, and these are arranged with precise detail.
He faces the closed door as if looking in or waiting for it to open. Inside my sister might be sitting in front of the mirror, unaware of the young man who hovers just outside. I think I ought to warn her, then chide myself for being foolish. Of course it is an echo. Why should I be afraid of an echo? Yet I get an awful feeling from him, this young man so happy to stomp birds to death, and perhaps I am right to have this feeling, for I notice that he is holding a kitchen knife. What would he be doing with that knife up here on the second floor?
I back away down the length of the hall to my own room as he turns around, looking through me with those indistinguishable black pits for eyes, blank like the dead, out of that strangely unfocused face. I walk backward all the way to my room, grateful to find the doorknob in my hand. With a thrill of unfounded fear I close and lock the door behind me, then turn and listen to the slow footsteps creaking across the hall toward my room. Inside all looks just as it did when I was a girl, and it is to the bed with its ruffled blue comforter that I move, where I sit listening to my anxious heart and the heavy approaching footsteps that stop just outside my door. Stop being so afraid, I tell myself. You are being foolish.