“That is what people say.”
“How? Why? What do you know about his death?”
“Well, I didn’t know Sawyer. I wasn’t even born when he died. But Anise knew him. She knew the whole family.”
“Is there anything you can tell me?”
She shrugs and shakes her head, her face growing a little sad. “Teenage or pre-teenage depression, I assume. He was what, twelve or thirteen? Back then, it wasn’t really understood or treated.”
“And the… means?”
“He bled to death.”
“He slashed his wrists?”
“Something like that. But, honestly, my sense is that it was more complicated. Anise might know the details.”
Honestly. The word sounds insincere to you. Deceitful, maybe. How could she not recall the way a local boy had killed himself, even if it was before she was born? Wouldn’t it be a part of the lore of this small village, the sagas and stories and secrets that everyone shared? But, perhaps, you are being unfair; perhaps it really isn’t discussed around here. New England reticence. Propriety. And it was a long, long time ago.
“You must be looking forward to spring,” she says suddenly, her voice lightening. “It might be my favorite season. I love it-although I understand that for many people around here spring is a very mixed bag: mud and more mud. Lots of gray days. I tell you, crocuses this far north must have a death wish. No sooner do they poke their pretty little heads through the grass than they get hammered with eight inches of very wet snow. But there will also be some absolutely glorious days. Just wonderful! And there is sugaring to look forward to. I don’t sugar myself. But I have friends who do. You must bring your twins to a sugarhouse. I think they would love it: Sugar on snow, the aroma of maple. The samples. No child can resist a sugarhouse!”
“We will. Anyone’s sugarhouse in particular?”
“I think you should stop by the Milliers’. Claude and Lavender Millier. It will be weeks before there’s a sugar run. Or it might be a month. You never know. But I’ll introduce you between now and then.”
“Thank you. Do they have children?”
“Grown. But I know their son will scoot up from Salem for a few days to help with the boiling. He’s a doctor. A pediatrician. He’s part of a beautiful practice in a big old barn of a house with fantastic views of the ocean.”
“Anyone with a sugarhouse and children roughly Hallie and Garnet’s age?”
“Of course. I’ll just have to think a moment. I hear they’re doing very well in school.”
“You hear a lot,” you say, a reflex, and wish instantly that you could take the remark back. It isn’t like you. It’s just that everyone always seemed to be talking about you back in Pennsylvania this past autumn and winter, and now everyone seems to be talking about your whole family here in New Hampshire.
“Oh, you know how people chat in a small town. We haven’t anything better to do-especially this time of the year, when the days are short as a pepper plant.” She looks out the large picture window and continues, her voice a little dreamy. “Soon the geese will be coming back. We’ll see them flying north in just a few weeks. I love geese. Big, powerful birds. They’re another sign of spring.” Then she turns back to you and makes eye contact. “Tell me: Would you and Emily and your beautiful twins like to come to my house for dinner this weekend? Perhaps a casual dinner on Sunday night? Something easy and light?”
This is an enormous amount of information to try to make sense of: There is, as Emily would say, text and subtext. No one can use the words goose and geese around you without knowing that they connote profoundly disturbing images. They do not provoke a PTSD sort of flashback-you do not find yourself sweating when you hear them, they do not induce heart palpitations-but they do conjure for you the destruction of your airplane and the deaths of thirty-nine people. Thirty-six adults, three children. Including one with a doll dressed as a cheerleader. That, too, wound up floating in Lake Champlain, the eyes open, the hair the color of corn silk fanning out like seaweed in the waves. And then there was the girl with the Dora the Explorer backpack. All of the children were, you would learn later, younger than Hallie and Garnet.
At the same time, there is that dinner invitation, proffered out of the blue. An unexpected kindness.
You are not at all sure what to make of the juxtaposition. Was the invitation a spontaneous gesture provoked by guilt? Had she brought up the birds without thinking and then, after realizing what she had done, hoped to make amends with dinner?
“Well, that’s very sweet of you,” you hear yourself murmuring. “Thank you. Let me check with Emily and get back to you.”
“It will be very casual. Maybe some others will come.”
“I’m free!” says Holly from behind her desk, though she doesn’t look up when you glance back at her. “I want to come!”
“Of course,” says Reseda.
You find yourself struck by the names of all of these women around you. Reseda. Holly. Anise. You decide that either you have stumbled upon a secret society of florists or gardeners or all of their parents were hippies. Or, perhaps, they’re part of a coven. You are bemused by that notion in particular and conclude the synaptic link was triggered by the mention, a few minutes ago, of Salem. You always think of witches when you hear the name of that small city. Everyone does. The burning times. The hangings. The women (and men) pressed to death by stones.
“You’re grinning,” says Reseda.
“I just had a funny thought.”
“Can you share it?”
“I like your name. I like all of your names here.”
“The reseda is among the most enticing and fragrant flowers in the world,” she says, and you realize that you’re not in the slightest bit surprised.
When you leave a few minutes later, you have in one hand Gerard’s phone number and in the other a thick espresso-chip cookie from a batch that Anise had baked that very morning and dropped off at the real estate agency. You doubt you will ever call Gerard, at least about that door. But you are glad that you have the cookie. It’s delicious. You hadn’t realized how hungry you were.
Chapter Five
A bird became trapped in the woodstove. It flew in through the top of the chimney just as the late winter sun was starting to thaw the thin skins of ice on the shallow puddles in the driveway. No one was awake in the house. The animal worked its way lower and lower in the Metalbestos prefabricated chimney-a sparkling, cylindrical metal tube that was nine inches wide-from the opening nearly four feet above the twelve-by-twelve pitch made of slate and through the tube that cut through the attic and the second floor, darting finally through the rectangular vent to the catalytic converter and then into the soapstone stove with its regal glass windows. The windows were caked over with soot from fires long ago as well as from the few logs the Lintons had burned, and so the bird flew around and around in the near total dark, its wings frequently clipping the iron walls or the black stains on the glass. Desdemona, the Lintons’ cat, was aware of the animal before anyone else, and she stared alertly at the stove, her haunches raised ever so slightly and her tail occasionally brushing the floor.
Emily was the first one downstairs that morning, and when she saw the cat watching the stove as if it were a mole hole in the yard back in Pennsylvania, she didn’t know what to think. But she switched on the lamp beside the couch and two heavy boxes of unpacked books, and instantly the poor bird made another effort to escape, thwapping into the door because the flue was open just enough to create thin slats of light. Emily knew instantly then what was so interesting to Desdemona. She screamed upstairs to Chip because she was afraid of birds and knew that, once she opened the woodstove door and the bird flew out into the room, she would be utterly useless. And yet it was only when she heard him on the stairs, asking her what was wrong, that she knew how strange and inconsiderate it would be to tell him her panic had been caused by a bird. One small bird. But with the competence that formerly she had taken for granted, he opened the window nearest the stove and closed the door between the living room and the dining room-the room with, perhaps, the strangest, darkest wallpaper, a series of sunflowers that grew from the hardwood floor to the height of a grown man and, over time, had become brown with age and made her think of the elongated, damned souls in an El Greco painting-and used a bath towel to whisk the bird in the direction of the open window. It was a chickadee. She noticed a little black soot on its gray wings and the white of its nape. Instead of flying through the open half of the window, however, the bird darted straight into the solid pane above it, breaking its neck and falling dead onto the carpet.