I don’t exactly know. The notes and the sketches feel vaguely familiar. Then there’s the drowning, and why my mother knew Bess Visser’s name, and the oddness about the twenty-fourth; it’s becoming an itch. “The guy who sent it to me might be right. I’m pretty sure it has to do with my family.”
Alice casts an eye toward the clock above the computer bank. Eleven o’clock. She needs to start setting up for a speaker soon. Don Buchman on salt marsh birds. She stretches. “You can’t find family in a book, Simon.”
I shrug. “You can’t fix me with platitudes, Alice.”
“No, you’re unfixable,” she replies. A soft chuckle — hers, mine. A curve of the lips. She grabs my hand and we both squeeze. “Is there anything I can do?”
Maybe it’s because Alice said it, maybe it’s because Enola hasn’t shown up, but I want to find my family, in this book or elsewhere, and figure out what happened to us. “Would you mind doing a little more digging? I’m looking for anything you can turn up on two women, Verona Bonn and Celine Duvel. I’ve hit a roadblock.”
“I was thinking something more along the lines of leaving early, but okay, sure. I’ll check out your future dates for you.”
“It’s not like that — they’re relatives. There’s just something I’m curious about. I think they might fit into a pattern.”
She arches a brow. “Care to enlighten me?”
“It’s nothing really. I just need a project. You know me, I’m better with a project.”
“I know.”
The morning is lost to taping bindings and polishing grant language. At lunch I email résumés. For the hell of it I send one to Sanders-Beecher, even one to a museum in Texas. The beauty of electronic applications is the fantasy — thousands of miles disappear with a click. Then I’m helping a little girl named Lucinda find a book in the folklore section. It’s a book on selkies, one that’s thick, with a green buckram cover. I remember pulling strings from the binding years ago. Not far from selkies is a smaller book with a melancholy spine. Fairy tales — Russian folk stories, legends and poems from the Baltic. Mom read to me from it. I’ve got no more right to it than anyone else, but I tuck it under my arm and wander back through the stacks. I need one more book.
The library’s copy of The Tenets of the Oracle has a simple red cloth binding, not embossed like Churchwarry’s. It’s a newer edition filled with art nouveau illustrations and seems less an informative text than an homage to mysticism. Churchwarry was right. The drawing of the card in my book seems to be an archetypical rendering of the Tower card, though it’s rougher than the picture in The Tenets, and has a lone man falling instead of two men crashing into waves. The Tenets’ illustrations are beautiful, delicate — but not like those in my book. It’s a signifier of change, and is just as likely to mark a new beginning as it does an end. A fitting card to study for the freshly jobless. I snag an hour or so in storage to page through it. Storage was my realm, a room with musty cabinets of materials not accessed frequently enough to earn a place on the shelves. Colonial printing history, animal husbandry, forgotten biographies. Someone else will have to run back here. By the time I leave storage and return to my desk, Alice has left a small stack of newspaper articles, photocopies, and printouts. On top of the pile is a call slip with her tight, slanted script.
S— Some info on your names. What’s with the paywall on this stuff? Should I be concerned you’re looking into dead women? P.S. My dad called. Gutter’s falling off your place. Let’s get you drunk. Pick me up at 8:00. —A
I sandwich the papers between the books and leave. Walking out the door feels almost like swimming, and I barely recognize the wire lawn sculpture I’ve hated since it appeared five years ago. I toss the stolen books onto the passenger seat along with Peabody’s. I have two weeks to give Janice, but I won’t go back. In my family we don’t prolong goodbyes.
I speed the entire drive home. When the car bottoms out on the dip by the harbor I laugh.
The reality of how close the house is to the cliff sinks in when I pull into the driveway. Instead of sitting down with Alice’s printouts or cleaning up for a night out at the Oaks, I attack the roof.
I hammer and wrestle the twisted metal back into the semblance of a working gutter. The brackets and screws are still attached, as though the roof itself shifted. An hour’s worth of hammering and bending and shredding my hands, and the gutter is ready to be reattached to the eave. The wood splinters under the first screw. I adjust, try again, but it gives way once more, sending a chunk careening to the ground. Third and fourth attempts only loosen shingles and further disintegrate the eave. The gutter falls, beginning an outline around a soon-to-be-dead house. The roof is rotting. This is something I should have known to fix years ago, should have known needed maintaining, but no one told me. I was left a house and a sister, with no instructions on either. And the cliff creeps closer.
We used to run down it, Enola and I, feet sinking deep. Her hand in mine, we pulled each other to the shore, gape-mouthed and howling. Each leap had us falling, counting seconds before we touched ground. Knees bent we’d land, the earth catching us and giving way, sliding down to the sea. Each step chewed at the houses around us, mine.
I would take every one of those steps back.
I let the gutter lie. Hop over it to go up the step, tug the damned door that never opens. Into the living room. Pick up the phone. Call Alice.
“It’s me.”
“You skipped out,” she says. It’s hard to tell how she feels about that.
“I’m sorry,” I say, to be safe. “Do you mind if I come by early? Is that okay? I can’t be here right now.”
6
It had been long years since the house in Krommeskill had known a baby. It was a place of clouds, hidden in the Hudson’s haze and ruled by the strict and righteous hand of Sarah Visser — Grandmother Visser.
The trouble with Evangeline started long before Amos saw her in a lightning field. The trouble was that she’d been born.
“Naught is right with you,” Grandmother Visser said upon examining Evangeline. “But I shall fix you.” Her heavy cheeks shook. The baby was peculiar. She stared at those who held her from eyes like her father’s, a strange man who’d tapped at her mother’s window on nights when mist came off the river. Eyes colored like copper and dead dandelions, eyes in which Grandmother Visser saw her daughter’s fall from grace.
Amelia Visser, the child’s mother, was sixteen when the man visited her window. He breathed otherness, and a secret light burned inside him, spilling out when he spoke. His skin had a faint yellow hue like brass or gold, his hair was sooty black, his features were both boy and man, and infinitely interesting to Amelia.
The rapping sound had been gentle. Amelia drew back the curtain on those eyes the color of weathered metal. She opened the window.
His voice, a warm humming. “I’ve seen you at the river. May I watch you swim on the morrow?” Softness can compel, a voice can mesmerize, as did this man’s quiet lilt.
Amelia felt him when she swam — in the tall grass and shadows of the woods, in the water itself because it tickled and made her skin come alive. Upon returning from the river Amelia discovered a strange shell left on her windowsill, a gift from the man. Smooth and hard with a sharp tail and spiny legs that ended in claws she dared not touch. She caressed the shell’s fragile dome. It was curved and shaped like a horse’s shoe. She left her window open with the drapes thrown wide. When her mother asked her why, Amelia answered, “For the brass-skinned man with the copper eyes,” and had the backs of her hands switched for fibbing.