Stephen’s face fell, as if disappointed.
“You work in an orphanage? Caring for children?”
Liv nodded.
He frowned and shrugged.
“To each their own, as they say. I had rather imagined you as a sorceress on the islands of Scandinavia, directing the wind, but here you are…” He trailed off.
Twenty years earlier, the comment would have bruised her, but she no longer cared for Stephen’s approval.
“Liv, I’m delighted to see you. But why are you here?” he continued, swirling the dark liquid in his crystal glass.
Liv crushed her hands in her lap. The courage of the previous days had been battered by the travel, and more so, by the memories. Memories that beat against the doors of her mind as she rode on the train to northern Michigan.
“It’s time to make amends,” she told Stephen, looking into his eyes. “George always said the past circles around. We’ve no idea how long it will take, but eventually it returns.”
“Have you seen George?” Stephen asked, sipping his drink.
Something in his tone put Liv on edge.
“No.” Though she had seen him in her dreams.
He nodded, finished his drink and stood.
“Stephen.” He stopped and turned back to her. “We have to go to the police. We have to tell-” Liv insisted.
“You’re right,” he interrupted her.
She watched him. His jaw was set, as if he held his cheek clamped between his teeth.
“I hate to do it. It’s the end of our lives, after all. But of course, you’re right,” he conceded.
He slipped from the room, and she loosened her twined fingers, though her heart continued to thump against her breastbone.
She tried to relax, invite a sigh into her constricted diaphragm, but her body remained tense.
‘Your body knows, Volva,’ George used to tell her. ‘Your body knows what the mind can’t see.’
She realized she did not believe Stephen.
She had expected him to resist, to be angry. His compliance troubled her. But why should it? Perhaps he too had been plagued all these years. How could he not have been?
She watched the doorway he’d disappeared into when a small creak sounded behind her.
Twisting around, she saw him from the corner of her eye. He had slipped into the sitting room through another door.
She hitched forward and tried to jerk away, but he sank his hand into her long hair and yanked her head back. He jabbed something sharp into her neck.
Liv cried out and hurled her body forward. He released her hair, and she catapulted from the couch, out of control, and into the coffee table. She landed on the wood, and one of the legs splintered. Her glass of sherry tumbled to the floor, staining the rug.
Stephen watched her, making no move to catch Liv as she scrambled away.
The drug moved swiftly through her veins. She felt the icy current fanning down her legs, pumping toward her heart.
‘Block it,’ George whispered in her ear.
She gazed at the floor as if he would be sitting there, but saw only the fine particles of dust drifting in the lamplight.
She crawled on her hands and knees toward the hallway.
Drawing in a shaky breath, she tried to imagine how she might stop the poison in her blood. Only the panicked emptiness of her mind returned. She didn’t know.
Her hand grew numb, and when she went to put weight on it, she crashed onto her face instead. She lay in Stephen’s hallway, face down, the toes on her left foot twitching.
Focusing on her breath, she counted to ten.
“One, two, theer, no thwee, no.” But she couldn’t say it. Her tongue lay thick and heavy on the floor of her mouth.
Stephen’s feet moved into her line of sight, but her eyelids had grown too heavy.
She wanted to grab him, demand that he stop, but the darkness reached up and pulled her in.
Chapter 10
September 1965
Jesse
Jesse woke at dawn, refreshed as he hadn’t been in months. He sat up and gazed around the room.
The walls were papered in scrolling foliage that ended in a dark velvet border topped by crown molding. A heavy gold chandelier dangled in the center of the room.
Jesse watched cobwebs swaying beneath the chunky fixture, light filtering through the gauzy tendrils.
Remembering the woman, Jesse searched the house. He opened curtains, peeked in closets and beneath furniture.
The search took on a feverish quality when he reached the attic, but he maintained his composure, carefully returning furniture to its exact location rather than flinging it aside in his frenzy to find some evidence the woman had been there.
There was no woman, and the more he thought about it, the more absurd the idea of a woman became. What woman in her right mind would arrive at that house in the dead of night?
No car had pulled into the driveway. He would have awoken to a splash of headlights, a car door slamming, something.
He’d imagined her.
Strangely, he could still see her long, pale legs stretched on the chaise.
Jesse was no stranger to hallucinations.
In the months after Nell and Gabriel died, he saw them everywhere. He once grabbed a woman at the train station who so resembled Nell that his heart nearly leapt from his chest. The woman had turned wide, terrified eyes on him, clutched her purse, and ran toward the conductor as if Jesse had attacked her.
Eventually, the visions faded. Even in his dreams, he rarely saw his departed wife and son.
Perhaps had they had gone on. To where, he didn’t quite know.
Jesse’s father had been a man of faith, but not a man of the church. They never attended a single service.
Jesse’s understanding of the bible came through the harsh declarations made by the nuns in various orphanages he’d occupied in his youth. When he could not quote scripture, they beat him. In that cruel way, he learned the words of God — some of them, anyhow — but they did little to comfort him in the days after the death of his family.
Instead, he grieved Nell and Gabriel as if they’d gone into the ground to darkness.
After his search, Jesse returned to the kitchen.
He flicked on the faucet. It groaned and spat rust-colored sludge into the sink, but after several seconds, the water ran clear.
Jesse found an old cannister of coffee. As he waited for water to boil in the kettle, he opened cupboards, marveling at the stacks of porcelain dishes and the sparkling goblets.
Drinking his coffee from a delicate white and silver cup, he toured the house a second time, more slowly, no longer hunting for a phantom woman.
The house appeared as if the owners woke up one morning and walked out. Clothes hung in the closets. A hairbrush lay by the sink in the upstairs bathroom. The beds were made.
In the largest bedroom, where he’d imagined the woman, pink satin slippers lay next to the bed as if their owner had taken them off one night, climbed into bed, and disappeared.
The third floor contained a bedroom he imagined belonged to a young man. The clothes were about Jesse’s size, but included school uniforms. A stack of high school textbooks lay scattered on a dresser top.
When he returned to the kitchen, Jesse found the remains of a half-eaten cake in the icebox. The cupboard held jars of apples and blueberries, and he gorged himself on the oversweet pie fillings.
He bathed quickly, unable to shake the sense of eyes gazing at him from the cracked bathroom door. He would have liked to savor the shower. Like so many other things, a proper shower had been a luxury of the past, but his paranoia got the better of him.
When he opened the door, the long hall stood empty - save the hundreds of eyes staring out from the portraits on the walls.
* * *
Jesse cleaned the kettle and returned it the cupboard. He rinsed his cup and put it away. He even smoothed the fibers of the rug he’d slept on the night before.
Convinced that the house looked exactly as it had when he entered it, he left through the cellar.
The daylight through the open cellar doors washed away the darkness from the night before. He observed bottles of wine and stacks of empty crates.
He closed the cellar doors behind him and wandered into the woods, deep in contemplation.
He’d never been a thief.
A year before, when he’d lost his wife and child, he walked out on his life. He left their little house, surely now cleaned and rented to someone else.
He’d abandoned his job without so much as a note to his boss.
He’d just left - left it all. Packed his bag and walked out of town.
He still wore the same pair of shoes. He’d brought one change of clothes, a booklet of photographs, Gabriel’s stuffed Mickey Mouse, and all the money he’d had to his name, which after the funeral expenses had been little.
Since then, he’d slept beneath bridges, or tucked between boxes on the railroad cars. The soles of his feet were hard, his face was tanned, and the youthful appearance he’d had for the first forty years of his life had been replaced with grooves of sorrow.
For two hours, Jesse walked the woods around the big, abandoned house, considering his options. He paused at the train tracks that would take him to another town.
The thought of walking away from the house caused an ache in his gut.
“Why?” he wondered out loud.
Birds and crickets and the breeze in the leaves offered their own replies, but none told him the answer he sought.
Maybe his achy body needed a rest, or he longed for another morning or two with running water. Whatever the reason, he would stay a few more days.
And why not fill the coffers first, his father would say?
With a few bucks, Jesse could buy a new pair of shoes. He could easily pilfer a few items that would never be missed.
He walked back to the house.
The house was desolate and, Jesse paused at the thought, almost hostile. Even the midday sun did little to warm its dark façade. Patches of moss coated the once black shingles on the roof. The porch looked rotted in spots, paint peeling from its rails and beams.
Perhaps most of all, Jesse noticed the overgrowth. Vines crawled up the house’s exterior as if trying to squirm into the tightly shut windows. Bushes, likely once manicured, were heaping and bushy. They rolled out from the house in prickly waves.
Yes, the house had been abandoned, and Jesse wanted to know why.
* * *
The third-floor bedroom held clothes in a size just about perfect for Jesse. They were dated items, but good quality. Tailored jackets and pressed white shirts hung from satin-covered hangers.
The boy who’d worn them clearly lived a life of privilege. Jesse doubted a few pairs of trousers would be missed.
He grabbed a clean leather suitcase and headed for the dining room, selecting four silver candlesticks and a handful of sterling silver cutlery. He added an antique-looking mantel clock, which he wrapped in a towel.
Wearing the young man’s clothes, Jesse walked into town and, using the last few dollars to his name, he bought a train ticket for Harrison.
“Jesse K., what brings you to these parts?” The man eyed him up and down with fast, dark eyes that reminded Jesse of a watchful owl.
“I need to move a few things, Rockie,” Jesse murmured, glancing toward the other men sitting at tables drinking hooch and playing cards. The man’s name was not actually Rockie. Jesse didn’t know his true name, but he knew how Rockie used to chisel holes in rocks and slip papers inside to smuggle them into the prison during his ten long years at the Southern Michigan State Prison.
“Come into some inheritance?” Rockie smirked.
“Seems so.” Jesse tilted the suitcase so Rockie could see the candlesticks and silverware.
“Come on back.” Rockie led Jesse into the back room.
The room held only a single wooden table. Beyond the first back room stood two more, one with merchandise and the last with a safe. Rockie had drunkenly showed Jesse the interior rooms after a long poker game several months before. Jesse doubted that Rockie remembered. The man had passed out, face pressed against a full house, and not woken. Jesse had joined him in sleep, happy to be indoors, opting to stretch out on the sticky floor rather than suffer the backache of sleeping over the table.
Rockie gave him a handful of bills and slapped him on the back.
“Guys are fixin’ to start a game. Care to join us? Sees how you got some cash to work with.” Rockie winked at the money, but Jesse shook his head.
“I’m fixing to travel south.”
Jesse slipped out the door and down the alley, heading to catch his return bus.
By the time he reached Gaylord, the storm had come.
He stepped from the bus and hurried out of town.
Somehow in the downpour, Jesse could breathe again. As if the oxygen from all that water bled into the air, and he gulped it like an alcoholic who’d almost made it, but then found the bottle again and relieved a thirst that felt thousands of years in the making.
He rushed beneath canopies of willows and maples, ash and pine. Some held the water high, nature’s way of scrimping and saving for the big drought. Others just let it go, and it poured onto his head and flattened his carefully parted hair. It roared over his face and soaked the lapels of his stiff jacket.
He paused beneath a willow. It was like standing inside a waterfall. Miserably, he remembered one such moment, years before, when he stood beneath a waterfall in the Upper Peninsula with his wife. She had leaned into him, her breath moist against his ear, and whispered that he was going to be a father.
Sorrow stole the joy from his memory.
Jesse ran, and soon his slacks and socks were soaked to his skin and his shining shoes had gone from black to muddy brown. He ripped off the stranger’s jacket and left it laying in a tangle of brush.
After a while, he found a river. He sat on a sledge of rock, flat and dulled by the sun. The water ran off its edges, and he clenched his eyes against the rain that continued to pour.
He wished to close his brain as tightly as his eyelids, but it fluttered and thrashed until the images he’d run so hard to escape began to slip back in.
Gabriel, his child, in his dark suit with his face a white mask of indifference bedded in the satin-lined casket Jesse had chosen. Gabriel, God is my strength. His name had been his wife’s choice, and Jesse complied. He hardly counted himself devoted to God, but in Nell and Gabriel, he had found his elusive creator.
And almost as quickly lost him again.
Jesse laid back and let the rain wash over him. If it picked up, it might sweep him into the river.
An appropriate death, he thought. Nell and Gabriel had both drowned. Not on a rainy, gloomy day, but in the peak of summer, when death crept in without a whisper of warning.
Who noticed the angel of death on a sunny Monday afternoon at a little lake in the woods?
The rain slowed to a drizzle.
Jesse stared into the overcast sky, the gray of sodden clay, and wished he could fill the emptiness inside him. If he gulped the river until he was near to exploding, he wondered if he might find a moment of relief from the constant hollow within.
He returned to the house and emptied the money he’d tucked into the pocket of another man’s pants.
Jesse looked at the wet bills spread across the table and considered lighting a fire in one of the home’s three fireplaces and burning them.
Objects that once held value, that ruled his life, had become obsolete. The bills conjured no joy, no dread, no anything. They merely represented his likelihood of surviving, eating, getting a bath. If he selected a few more items, he’d have a grubstake. He could buy a train ticket south, land somewhere warm before winter returned to Michigan.
He could head for Mississippi or to the Florida Keys.
No, not there.
Nell loved to dream of Florid
a. Mangoes that grow in your backyard, she used to whisper. Oranges the size of melons. But they’d never had more than a few pennies to rub together between them. They’d both grown up poor, his father a drunk and hers a farmer.
Jesse didn’t dream the way Nell had. He’d watched his father do so for years, but his dreams never came true. Not even the small ones, such as winning the poker game so they could get a motel for the night.
Sometimes Jesse wondered if they weren’t the lucky ones - Nell and Gabriel. They got out early.
In his forty-one years, Jesse had seen mostly disappointment and despair. His seven years with Nell, two that included Gabriel, had been the only years of happiness he’d known. But their happiness had not included wealth. They lived in an old farmhouse with a big garden out back that they rented from an old man who’d moved in with his children years before. Jesse worked long hours drilling and servicing oil refineries. Before Gabe came along, Nell worked four days a week cleaning rooms at the Doherty Hotel.
They made ends meet, never went hungry, and for the two years they had their boy, they saved enough for big Christmas celebrations and a red tricycle on his second birthday.
Jesse imagined the tricycle on the farmhouse lawn. It had been his final image of the house that June day when he’d walked away from it all. He’d buried his wife and son two days before.
He stripped off his wet clothes and plodded up the stairs, forgoing his intention to leave the furniture untouched. He crawled into bed and pleaded for sleep to take him.
Chapter 11
August 1945
Liv
“What is that?” Stephen asked, startling Liv as she sat on a rock near the lake.
She pulled the stone from her eye and held it up to reveal the small round hole in the center.
“It’s called a hag stone.”
“A hag stone?” He crinkled his forehead and held out a hand.
“Can I see it?”
Liv hesitated. George had been very clear when she found the stone, she must never share its magic. The stone chose the seer, he said. Liv had only one stone, but George had six. They hung in a small leather satchel around his neck.
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