Dust to Dust

by Audrey Keown

  “Good, then.” He ducked his head in a short, energetic nod, smiled, and slipped his hands in his pockets. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “On the morrow then,” I said with a wink, and turned to see Dad peeking into the conservatory. A thought occurred to me. I looked back at Mr. Fig. “You called him here for the leak? On purpose?”

  “It seemed long past time for him to come home. And for you both to come clean.”

  This was the answer he had predicted would come to me when we were in the basement passage. All this time, he’d known that my dad was a Morrow, and he hadn’t told me.

  I set my teeth crookedly. I could choose to hold it against him, but only if I was going blind to my own choices. I had a lot of experience in justifying the keeping of secrets, and Mr. Fig had his reasons too.

  As if reading my mind, he said, “It wasn’t my secret to tell.”

  I took a breath and nodded that I understood.

  When I caught up to Dad, we started toward the back lawn.

  “Hey, is there still a big, old date palm in the conservatory?” he asked as we passed it.

  “Oh yeah, and lots of other great trees.”

  The copper gas lights blazed up as we reached the top of the garden.

  “I used to climb that one,” he said. “There was a big tangle of branches like a platform, and I could hang up there and spy on people for hours.”

  We walked down the terrace’s grand staircase. Below us, the nearly full moon lit the marble statues as if from the inside and painted the grass an electric blue.

  “So, why Nichols?” I said. “Why that name? Did it belong to someone else in the family?”

  He cinched up one corner of his mouth and shook his head.

  “What? Tell me.”

  “It’s stupid,” he said.

  An owl hooted from the direction of the old stable.

  “If anyone has a right to know, Dad …”

  “It was all I had left—nickels, a little more than pennies.”

  “A pun? My last name is a pun?”

  “I was eighteen.” He took a turn before we reached the fountain so that we stepped off the gravel path and onto the lawn.

  My feet squished in the thick grass, the ground still saturated after the snow.

  “So why wasn’t I able to find their graves on my own?”

  “Mm, yeah. It’s because the estate used to be bigger than this, Vee.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yeah, acres of forest and meadow.”

  We gave the old stable a wide berth. I was happy to see he also avoided it, confirming the spookiness I always felt about the place. Later, I’d ask him if there was a reason.

  “But after the house was donated to the city, they sold off this part, everything past the fence here.” The high iron fence was lined with a yew hedge as tall as a house. He gestured at the rooftop that peaked above its horizon. “The property was divided into three plots, actually. That’s when they built these houses. Broke my heart all over again.”

  We had reached a small break in the yew hedge that I hadn’t paid any attention to before. He pulled a latch, and a gate squeaked open. In the late-winter quiet, the fountain’s burble still carried across the grounds toward us.

  “If this fence was put in after you left …” I said.

  “Yeah, I came here a few times after. After Mom died. But not since the place was turned into a hotel. Didn’t feel right.”

  “Are we trespassing now?” I asked.

  “No. This kind of thing is covered by law. That’s why the gate’s here. They have to provide access as long as there are living relatives.”

  On the bluff edge of the neighbor’s backyard, a knee-high fence made a neat square around two lone gravestones. They were simple and small, nothing like the grand statues on the other side of the fence.

  A feeling stepped into focus that had been foggy since the moment Mr. Fig had confirmed my family’s graves were here on the property.

  For the past few days, as I’d looked for my grandparents’ headstones, I’d been propelled by a strange mix of dread and denial, but now, with them here in front of me, a new sense of attachment washed through me. I hadn’t expected to ever feel this way in a cemetery.

  “Dad passed away”—my dad cleared his throat—“before we actually lost the house. I had already moved out and gone to live with a friend.

  “They chose this out-of-the-way place because it was in this peaceful meadow, at the time, and that suited these modest stones better.”

  “Yeah, I agree.” I noticed the dates on my grandmother’s stone. “Nineteen ninety-three? The year after I was born. How old was she?”

  “Only sixty-three. Liver disease. They let her be buried here with him, even though we were gone from the place.”

  “That was kind. Why liver disease? Did she drink too much?”

  He nodded sadly.

  My top lip got all tight and wobbly. Maybe this was the kind of thing Mr. Fig had been apprehensive about me finding out. “Tell me something good about her.”

  “Oh. Well, how could I narrow it down to just one thing? For starters, she had the most beautiful singing voice in the world.”

  “You get it from her, then.”

  My whole life my dad had sung little tunes around the house. He had a voice like a clarinet.

  “And she was the most competent person,” he said. “She had a great head for business, which she never needed until Dad was gone.”

  Tears leaked in at the corners of my smile. “What about him?”

  He inhaled and tightened one cheek. “Mm, now Dad was a charmer, but one of those people who it was authentic for—do you know what I mean? It was never for show. He just liked making people feel special.”

  My tears flowed freely now. I’d never known them, so how could I have such a powerful feeling of missing them?

  All of the good qualities he told me about them were talents I saw in him too—his natural charisma, his ability to pick up the pieces after a crisis. I had missed so much not getting to have them in my life.

  Knowing him was a bit like knowing them. Still, more of a good thing was always more.

  “I keep having these realizations,” I said. “Like that I always thought Mom got her mental health issues from the Morrows, and now, that doesn’t add up.”

  He looked at me like he had a stomachache. “No. I think her challenges were more about what she experienced growing up. She never said so. She wasn’t able to look at it, but her family gave her those challenges, just not genetically, like ours.”

  “I don’t understand how a lie could make more sense to me than the truth.”

  “But that’s why we lie to ourselves, to make sense of things we can’t understand.” He reached down and picked some moss off his father’s gravestone. “We tell ourselves we could’ve stopped things from happening, stopped people from leaving us, stopped them from hurting.”

  “So, my anxiety, it really doesn’t come from her?”

  “It came from me.” He shrugged.

  I put a hand over my mouth, then folded my arms. “But, but you seem so …”

  “Normal?” He grinned.

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “It was you, babe.” He looked into my eyes. “You gave me the reason I needed to fight it.”

  A house or two down the block, someone called a dog. A car blaring hip-hop passed in the distance. And I, Ivy Nichols, began to understand my father.

  It wasn’t for me only that he didn’t drink coffee. He took long walks and found creative outlets. He told me to take my meds because he knew the consequences, firsthand, of letting the anxiety get out of control. I wondered if he’d taken pills at some point too, but this wasn’t the moment for asking.

  A string of memories flashed through my mind, and I sucked in a breath. I remembered him after my mom left, and now that I knew about it, his anxiety was obvious. The way he hadn’t dressed himself some mornings, the way he
used to pace the floor, the days I found him curled in a ball on his bed.

  And just like that, the last trace of hostility about his secrets left in me was drowned in appreciation for him.

  “Dad, did the things in the secret passage help you?”

  “What?”

  “The machines, the books, the special room,” I said.

  “Ivy, what are you talking about?”

  My throat seized up. Could it be that he didn’t know? And if I showed him, would it be okay? Would it hurt him that there was a secret so big in his boyhood home—that his parents hadn’t told him, if they knew at all themselves?

  “Dad, I have something to show you. I don’t know if you’ll like it.”

  “Well,” he said. “Do you like it?”

  “Oh yes, very much.” He would be my road to the past, and I would be his way back home.

  XXII

  Deeper Magic

  I led Dad through the conservatory toward the camouflaged opening to the basement passage. In the uneven darkness between lampposts, we ducked under a rough tree branch that overhung the path like an old man’s arm.

  I felt him watching my face and looked back at him. “What is it?”

  He smiled. “The day I took the call to come here for the leak, I went home later and thought about you being in this house.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Of course I’d imagined you here before that, but it was different … having seen you here … in your uniform and everything.”

  I slipped my arm through the crook of his. “And?”

  “And I knew you would love this place, and you do.”

  “I do. There’s a lot of competition for my favorite room here, with the gardens and the library, but this is definitely in the running.”

  We had crossed to the western side of the conservatory now, and I paused in front of the orange tree.

  “Have you ever read the Aeneid?” I asked him.

  “Doesn’t everyone in school?”

  “Ha. Maybe at the fancy schools you went to. I barely knew what it was when Mr. Fig brought it up.”

  “This was when?”

  “Remember the fall I had last year? ‘At work’?” I made the air quotes with my fingers.

  He frowned slightly and nodded.

  “That was how I discovered this passage under the first floor. The second time Mr. Fig was with me, and we found the things I’m about to show you. And he explained what he meant by sic itur ad astra.”

  “So we go to the stars?”

  “So we go, thus we go, depending on the translation. Mr. Fig said it to me last year. It’s from the Aeneid.”

  “Yeah.” He paused, concentrating on something, although probably not the thick aspidistra where his eyes landed. “Sic itur ad astra.”

  Mr. Fig had sat down with me in the garden after we’d come up from the passage that day and told me how Apollo “bestrode a golden cloud” and visited Aeneas’s son during battle. “Mr. Fig got a bit sidetracked telling me how important the book was, how the writer—”

  “Virgil?” Dad asked.

  “Right. How Virgil started with these random legends about Aeneas wandering around after the Battle of Troy and from that wrote the Aeneid, which became a national epic.”

  “Yes, because it gave reason and importance to the story of Rome’s foundation and a whole bunch of other things.”

  “Yeah, anyway, so Aeneas and his son Ascanius, they were trying to build a new life for their people after the fall of Troy, and Virgil must have understood how their failing to save Troy weighed on them.

  “But while Ascanius is fighting in the place that will one day become Rome, Apollo tells him ‘Troy is too narrow for you.’ That’s the one quote I remember.”

  “That his past failures do not define him,” said Dad. “He is an heir of gods and an ancestor of gods to come.”

  “Yes. I thought you hadn’t been down here?”

  He shook his head. “I haven’t. But this part of the story is very familiar to me.”

  I cocked my head. He was being mysterious, and it wasn’t like him.

  I made sure we were both clear of the opening and, with a pointed look at Dad, found the heron in the ironwork along the wall and pushed its wing down an inch. The creak of the lowering panel was familiar to me.

  His mouth popped open along with the panel.

  I wagged my eyebrows at him and handed him my phone with the built-in flashlight turned on. “After you, sir.”

  He took the handrail and stepped down without hesitation. “Well, it doesn’t smell amazing.”

  “Yeah, I wish we could just leave it open all the time and let it air out.”

  We reached the bottom of the steps, and I put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. I flicked on the light and pointed up at the thick stone lintel at the top of the open archway in front of us.

  Dad looked up and read the words engraved in the stone. “Sic itur ad astra. Wow, my family was weird.”

  “And wonderful,” I said. “So this is what Apollo tells Ascanius—that it’s his ‘fresh courage’ that is his family’s path to the stars—to glory, in other words.”

  Dad grabbed my hand and squeezed it, and we passed under the arch together.

  “When he built the house, Murdoch had this secret basement put in for his wife Lillian.”

  “A secret basement? A secret passage. All this time?” He shook his head. “What—was it closed up for a hundred years, then?”

  “No, we’re pretty sure they kept using it even after Lillian.”

  “We?”

  “Mr. Fig and I.”

  He nodded, as if getting used to the idea of my friendship with the old man.

  “I’m interested in what you make of it, though.” I paused in front of the door to our left and sighed.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “It’s just—I never thought of you and me doing this. All this time, I imagined Mom was the connecting piece and that that piece was gone forever.”

  He looked at me, and the light caught on the moisture in the corners of his eyes.

  “So the first room has a couple of machines in it,” I said. “They were cutting-edge technology at the time, must have cost them a fortune.”

  We stepped into the room on the left, and I flipped on the light. The long, silver tube of the fever machine glimmered in the brightness.

  Dad dropped his jaw again and scanned the machine and the space around us. “Good golly Miss Molly.”

  I opened the lid of the fever machine and explained it to him.

  “It’s incredible,” he said, turning the knobs and tapping the dials. “Did it work at all? Or was it a bunch of hocus-pocus?”

  “I’ve looked into it. There’s actually a modern doctor inducing fever to treat depression. It’s a bit theoretical at this point, I think, but it has something to do with body heat generating electrical impulses in the spinal cord and the brain and generating serotonin.”

  Dad smirked.

  I must sound like Bea about now.

  Dad turned toward his right and examined a stack of shelves holding brown glass jars and blue bottles with faded labels, handling each piece with the same reverence I would, like we had dug our way to the burial chamber of a lost pharaoh. “And all of this?”

  “I’m not sure about everything, but this”—I laid my hand on something that looked like a complicated beverage dispenser with dusty thick glass and an oxidized spout—“is a radium water jar.”

  “Radium? They drank the stuff?”

  I nodded and smiled grimly. “Thought to cure all sorts of madness.”

  “Jeez. I think I may need to sit down.” He put his hands on his waist, taking it all in. “All this time. How’d you figure all this out?”

  “That’s a great segue to the next room.”

  I led him across the hall, all the time with him giving me this funny look, like he saw me differently now.

  I turned on the light in a room with
a giant bookcase on each wall and a small armchair with a simple side table in the middle of the room.

  “Another library?” His eyes gaped, and he spun from one stack to another, raking his eyes over the old volumes, our sacred family texts. “But why? Why keep books down here when there’s a library upstairs?”

  “The best I can figure is that these titles were either scandalous just to own or would’ve caused people to talk.”

  “But why not keep them in a locked cabinet upstairs?” he asked.

  “That’s where the chair in the middle of the room comes in. If Murdoch, I imagine, or any other member of the family was seen reading these, it would have fed the rumors that the family was already trying to silence.”

  “You’re right.” He sighed. “There’s not much privacy when you live with a household staff.”

  He tilted his head to read the titles on the old editions. “William James. The Principles of Psychology. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams. That one I’ve heard of.”

  “The other bookcase has a bunch of old copies of the American Journal of Psychology and the Journal of Educational Psychology,” I said.

  “This place is so psychoanalyzed, even the bookshelves have issues.”

  I laughed and handed him a tiny volume more pamphlet than book. “This one explains the fever machine. And this one”—I flashed another cover at him—“talks about treatment with radon.”

  “You’ve spent a lot of time down here, huh?”

  “Well, I’m lucky to share the interest with my ancestors.” I wanted to keep it light. I wanted to wink at him, but a wave of emotion rose in me, and my next words shook. “Actually, it’s more than some kind of academic hobby … I think these rooms might have been sort of sacred to our family. This was their secret, and now I’m one of the few people in on it.”

  He put one arm around me and squeezed me, then kissed my head.

  “And what’s down the hall?” He stuck his head out the open door.

  “A bedroom.” I waggled my eyebrows. “And a hydroelectric bath chamber.”

  He jerked his head back. “Something about that—I mean, bath and electric shouldn’t be in the same sentence.”