The Invited (ARC)

by Jennifer McMahon

  Everything about this place was wonderful and new, full of magic. “It’s like another planet here,” Helen said, leaning into Nate, who hugged her from behind.

  He showed her the pitcher plants with red heart-like flowers and leaves at the bottom shaped like little pitchers.

  “They’re carnivorous,” he said. “Bugs are drawn into the pitcher, and they drown in the water there, then the plant digests them.”

  “Why don’t they just crawl out?”

  “They’re trapped. The sides are sticky and have little teeth. Once they’re in, there’s no easy way out.”

  Helen shivered.

  At the heart of the bog was a deep pool of dark water. Water lilies floated on the surface. Dragonflies soared over the top.

  “I wonder how deep it is,” Helen mused.

  “Could be pretty deep. It’s spring fed—feel how cold the water is here.”

  They got to the other side of the bog and found piles of large round fieldstone on the solid ground at the edge.

  “An old wall, maybe,” Nate suggested.

  Helen walked around, looking. “No. Look, there are four sides.” She stepped back, getting a better view. “It’s an old foundation. There was a building out here once, Nate! Maybe a small house!” She walked back up to the foundation, got a little thrill as she stood there, right on the place where she imagined a front door had once opened.

  “Funny place for a house, so close to the bog,” Nate said, brow furrowing in that way it did when something confused him, didn’t make sense to his rational mind.

  Helen leaned down, picked up a rock, wondered who had stacked it, how long ago, and what had happened to them. The rock seemed almost alive to her, thrumming with history, with possibility. She wondered what else she might find if she did a little digging around the site—glass, pottery, bits of metal—signs of the people who’d lived there once.

  “I bet there are old records, something that would tell us who lived here and when,” she said, getting excited. Maybe this had something to do with the ghost the realtor had mentioned that first day. Seeing proof of an actual building renewed her resolve to start looking into the history of the land—history that she was now directly linked to as the current owner and steward. “I’ll stop in at the town clerk’s office and library this week and see what I can find out.”

  Nate mumbled, “Sounds good, hon.” He was squatting down by a clump of pitcher plants, staring down the throat of one of them.

  Helen set the rock back down gently, caught a hint of movement to the side, and turned her head.

  “Do you see that?” she asked.

  “What?” He looked up.

  She pointed to the edge of the other side of the bog. “That huge bird.”

  Nate followed her finger, spotted the wading bird, and smiled. “Oh man! That’s a great blue heron!”

  It was a tall bird with a long neck and stork-like legs, and it wasn’t blue at all but a lovely gray.

  The bird turned and stared, eyes glowing yellow.

  Intruders, the eyes seemed to say. What are you doing here?

  “She’s watching us,” Helen said.

  “How do you know it’s a female?” Nate asked.

  “I just do,” Helen said.

  Nate pulled out his phone, started taking pictures of it. “I so wish I had my camera!” he said. “When we get back, I’ll look it up. Most birds have different coloration between the males and females.”

  The bird grew tired of watching, or of being watched, and took off, its enormous wings flapping, long legs tucked tight under its body, head and neck pulled back into an S shape.

  They turned to go, and Helen’s eye caught on something near the ground.

  “What’s that?” Nate asked, when she bent over to investigate.

  “A little piece of red string,” she said. It was tied around the base of a small bush.

  “Maybe it just blew in there and got stuck,” Nate suggested.

  “No,” Helen said. It was tied in a neat bow. “Someone put it here.” Helen untied the string—bright red and made of nylon, she guessed—and slipped it into her pocket. As they walked back along the path, she found several more pieces of string, all tied around trees, saplings, and bushes, the loose ends hanging, waving in the breeze like little caution flags.

  “Maybe the land was surveyed,” Nate said.

  “Maybe,” Helen said, knowing this wasn’t it. The red strings were too haphazard for that. And what surveyors used string and not plastic tape? Now that she was looking for them, she saw them everywhere—some weathered and frayed, and some looking bright and fresh.

  When they got back, the first thing Nate had done was pull out his field guide to eastern birds. “Turns out it’s almost impossible to tell a male from a female,” he said. He had his new nature journal open and was doing a quick sketch of the bird, recording details of the sighting. Helen had given him the Moleskine notebook as a gift when they were packing up for Vermont. “I thought it could be a sort of field journal. To keep track of your wildlife encounters at the new house.” Nate loved it. And now the great blue heron was the first official entry.

  He started reading her heron facts from the field guide: habitat, mating and gestation. “Though they hunt alone, they nest in colonies,” he was saying. He stopped and jotted a few of these facts down in his journal. “A female will lay two to seven eggs.”

  Helen was only half listening. Her eyes were on the opened bundle Nate had set on the kitchen table: the little nest that held the tooth and nail. She hadn’t wanted to bring it into the house. She thought the best thing to do would be to take it out and bury it deep in the woods. Throw it into the bog maybe. Then she had the irrational idea that it would act like a seed; that if she attempted to bury it or toss it into the bog, it would sprout, grow, turn into something powerful, something with more form, something alive.

  “Did you know that despite their size, the heron only weighs about five pounds?” Nate asked, not looking up from his field guide. “Unbelievable, right? It’s the hollow bones. All birds have hollow bones.”

  Helen took in a breath. Her head ached. Her own bones felt solid and stiff as concrete, heavy and sore.

  “Weren’t you going to go get us wine and pizza?”

  “Yeah, yeah, of course,” he said, closing the book. He ran into the bedroom to get changed and grab his wallet.

  “Hon?” he called as he walked back down the hallway. “Did you take any cash out of here?”

  “No.”

  He shook his head. “That’s weird. There’s about forty bucks less than I thought I had.”

  “You used a bunch of cash yesterday,” she reminded him. “At breakfast, then later at the store. Oh, you went out and got beer, remember?”

  “Right,” he said. “Maybe I spent more than I thought. Or maybe that kid at the store didn’t give me the right change.” He counted the money one more time, stared at it with a puzzled expression, then announced he was off. “Be back soon,” he promised.

  . . .

  By the time Nate returned with pizza and two bottles of wine, Helen had taken the world’s most unsatisfying lukewarm shower and changed into sweats and one of Nate’s T-shirts.

  “This one’s from a vineyard in Vermont,” he’d said proudly, holding up the bottle of Marquette.

  This was to be part of their new life: buying local. Eating and drinking local.

  But the truth was, at that point, she didn’t care if the goddamn wine was made from skunk cabbage from the bog: she just wanted a drink.

  Nate had also bought a local paper. The story of the crash was on the front page. Helen saw the smiling school photos of the dead teenagers and flipped it over, unable to look. It was too terrible. She was trying hard not to take it as an ominous sign of their new lives here.

  She too
k a deep breath, looked away from the newspaper.

  We are meant to be here, she told herself. We are living the life of our dreams.

  “There’s going to be a vigil tonight at the high school,” Nate said. “Maybe we should go.”

  Helen shook her head. “No. I can’t bear it. And it would be weird. We just got here. We’re not really part of the community yet. I’d feel . . . voyeuristic or something, you know?”

  Nate nodded. “I see what you mean.”

  After they finished the pizza (which was crappy, with too-sweet sauce and canned mushrooms, but still satisfying) and polished off the first bottle of wine, Nate got out his laptop and started playing the animal noises.

  Finally, mercifully, he stopped, put the computer away.

  Helen was trying hard not to be annoyed with him, making herself think of all his good points, reminding herself of how much she loved him. She was just stressed. There was no need to take it out on poor Nate.

  She thought back to when they met, both new teachers at Palmer Academy. It was at a faculty mixer the first week of school. Nate had worn a tie with the periodic table on it. There was another woman there, Stella Flemming, the English teacher, who kept cornering Nate, saying she wanted to put him and his tie in one of her poems. The first time Helen noticed him, she wondered why the handsome science teacher with the funny tie was looking at her so strangely. Later, she smiled, realizing that he’d been giving Helen pleading save me looks all night. At last, she walked over, touched his arm, and said, “You’re the science teacher, right?” He nodded encouragingly. “I was hoping you could help me. I hear the Pleiades are visible in the sky this time of year, but I’m not sure just where to look.”

  He smiled. “Ah, yes, the Seven Sisters. I’d be happy to point them out. Excuse us please, Stella.”

  “Thank you,” Nate whispered, once they were out of earshot.

  They walked out to the back lawn near the tennis courts and he showed her the stars. “Right there,” he said, taking her hand and pointing with it. “The Pleiades were the daughters of Atlas and the sea nymph Pleione,” he explained. “Zeus transformed them into doves, then into stars.”

  “Lovely,” she said.

  “Your dress reminds me of starlight,” he told her then. She looked down, saw the way the pale fabric seemed to shimmer in the lights around the tennis court.

  “Do you think Stella will come out looking for you?” Helen asked.

  Nate laughed. “Poor Stella. Maybe. She’s had a bit too much wine, I think.”

  “I heard her saying she wanted to put you in a poem,” Helen said.

  Nate laughed again. “Like I said, too much wine.”

  “So, you’re not a fan of poetry?”

  “Oh, I’m a big fan. In fact, I even write a bit from time to time.”

  Now Helen laughed. “Really?”

  He nodded, and in a half imitation of poor Stella, he said to Helen, “Be careful, I might just put you and your glimmering starlight dress in a poem.”

  She laughed again, but the next day, she’d found a typed poem in her faculty mail box: “Helen Talks History in a Dress of Stars.” It wasn’t half bad (not that Helen was qualified to judge poetry). She had it still and would tell people, years later, that it was the poem that won her over immediately, the poem that made her realize Nate was The One.

  “We got a lot done today,” he said now.

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “We should let the concrete cure a few days, but I’m thinking we can get the first-floor walls framed and ready to go up while we wait. Start cutting the pieces for the floor, too.”

  “I’d like to get the garden laid out,” Helen said. “Then we can get some plant starts at the farmers’ market on Saturday.”

  “Yeah, sure. Absolutely,” Nate said. Their plan was to just do a small kitchen garden this year: some greens, tomatoes, cukes, a few herbs. Next year, when they weren’t busy with building, they’d expand to a proper garden, put in berry bushes, a few fruit trees. They’d laid it all out on paper: their grand plan with year-by-year goals.

  “And I really want to get into town and do a little research. See what I can find out about the history of our new land.”

  “Sounds good,” he said.

  Nate cleared the dirty plates, pizza box, and empty wine bottle off the table, pulled out the house plans they’d carefully designed and laid them out.

  It was strange to see them here now, to realize that they’d actually begun to take shape—this house they’d planned, constructed on paper and in their heads and conversations.

  The saltbox was a simple design. Helen loved the name “saltbox” and the history of the design. It had been popular in colonial New England and named for the lidded box people had kept salt in. Classic lines, a chimney at the center, the rear of the house a single story, the front a full two stories.

  Helen thought back to the actual saltbox they’d looked at in New Hampshire at the beginning of their search; that house had sparked something deep inside her, had made her feel instantly at home. It was right in the village, down the street from a charming town green and Congregational church. She found herself playing the what-if game—what if they were there instead of here? What if she’d found a way to convince Nate to buy that house, to not move to this land on the bog in the middle of nowhere?

  Helen squinted down at the plans Nate had worked so hard on for months: the open kitchen and living room, a large pantry beside the kitchen, a woodstove in the center of the house, a half bath downstairs that shared a wall with the mechanical room, where the furnace and water heater would live, along with an eco-friendly low-energy washer and dryer. Upstairs would be the bedroom, bathroom, and a library with floor-to-ceiling shelves. Later, as time and finances allowed, they’d add a screened-in back porch. “I took everything you loved about that New Hampshire saltbox and just made it even better,” Nate had told her with a proud smile when he brought her his first sketched design.

  What she’d loved most was the history of that first house: the smell of the old wood, the creak of cupboard doors and floorboards, the warbly imperfections in the old single-pane windows.

  But she looked down now at what Nate had labeled dream house in neat, block handwriting, at the carefully rendered plans done to scale: elevation drawings; close-ups of each wall, the roof, and the stairs; detailed illustrations showing how they would frame the floors and ceilings. There were materials lists calculating how many board feet of lumber they needed, how much insulation, how many bundles of shingles. Everything looked so tidy, so perfect on paper: his plan for her happiness laid out in neat columns.

  And back in Connecticut, Nate managed to convince Helen that they could do this. He’d read books, watched videos, attended courses. “And you grew up building,” he’d reminded her. “It’s in your genes.”

  But none of that had prepared Helen for how unnerved she’d feel at the familiar screech of the powerful saw. Or the way Nate had looked at her when she mismeasured. Like she was a goddamned idiot.

  “It’ll get easier,” Nate said now, putting his hand over hers and giving it a squeeze. “I’m not saying it’ll be without its challenges, but we’ve just got to follow the plans. Stick together. We can do this.”

  Follow the plans, she thought.

  She smiled, took another gulp of wine.

  She thought of all the times she and her father had dealt with jobs that didn’t go as planned: weather delays, bad batches of lumber, late deliveries, angles that didn’t work no matter how perfect they’d looked on paper. She worried Nate seemed to live in a world where unpredictable things didn’t happen.

  Her eyes moved to the little bundle with the tooth and nail, resting on the kitchen counter beside the sink now, next to the dirty dishes.

  Nate rolled up the plans for their dream house.

  “Tomorrow wi
ll be a better day,” she said.

  Say it and make it true.

  CHAPTER 6

  Olive

  S MAY 19, 2015

  Daddy’s truck was in the driveway. He was home an hour early.

  Had the school gotten in touch with him? Told him Olive hadn’t shown up yet again? Had he come home to look for her?

  Olive felt panic seeping in, a little dribble at first, then a steady stream as she got closer to the house.

  She’d spent the day searching around with her metal detector on the northwest side of the bog. The metal detector was on the fritz—sometimes beeping when there was nothing at all beneath it, sometimes just dying altogether. It was crap, but she’d picked it up for thirty bucks at a church rummage sale last fall, so what did she expect? She was saving her money for a much better one, a hundred times more sensitive and powerful. It even came with headphones. Olive was sure that if she had this, she’d find the treasure in no time. She’d been saving allowances, doing any odd jobs she could find. She’d even skipped eating school lunch and pocketed the four bucks Daddy gave her each day. And Mike had offered to buy the old crappy one from her for the same price she’d paid for it, which seemed unfair, but he insisted, saying he knew it would be good luck for him because it had been hers and look at all the cool stuff she’d found with it.

  During today’s search, from time to time, she’d take a break and go up the hill on a little path to check on Helen and Nate (she knew their names now from hearing them talking, from watching them, but more than knowing their names, she felt she knew them). She’d been watching them from behind the moss-covered root system of a tree that had fallen over—it made the perfect cover. They were trying to frame one of the walls, but things hadn’t ended well—they’d started fighting as soon as things got hard. Olive almost felt sorry for them. Then they’d quit early (after getting into a fight when Helen cut a board too short) and had gone down to the bog, which meant Olive’s searching was over for the day. It was time to call it quits anyway because she wanted to get home before Daddy, get dinner started and make it look like she’d gone to school and was doing her homework like the good girl he thought she was.