The Companion

by Katie Alender

  “Are you thirsty?”

  No answer.

  “Bad dream?” I asked.

  She walked to the main doorway of the nursery and paused.

  “Are you going back to bed?” I asked hopefully.

  She stepped aside, holding the door open for me.

  It’s amazing what you can project onto someone who’s staring impassively at you. You can project that though they’re silent and still on the outside, on the inside they’re trying desperately to get you to help them with something mysterious and interesting.

  “Fine,” I whispered.

  I walked past her, and then she went around me to the locked entrance of the green wing.

  To my shock, she grabbed the doorknob, pushed against the door with her shoulder, and then bumped it with her hip. It opened easily, and then she led me into the forbidden hall.

  I’d already been in the first bedroom on the right, and I had no interest in going back . . . but that was where she stopped. She pulled that door open, too, and stepped away from it, revealing the darkened interior. Almost as if she was making room so I could go in. Alone.

  Oh, come on. My fear found a tremulous voice and spoke for me. “Nope,” I said. “Sorry.”

  She continued to stare at me, as tranquil as a statue of an angel.

  The whole situation was so bizarre that I actually hated to say no. But no, no, no. I had no desire to go back into that room. I’d already spent several hours there. Just the stale smell wafting out was enough to make me feel a thrill of fear.

  “I can’t, Agatha,” I said. I could hear a note in my voice that was almost pleading. “I don’t like it in there.”

  She reached up and tucked her hair behind her ear as she turned her face away.

  “You go in,” I said. “I’ll wait here.”

  Nothing.

  I took a deep breath and let it out with a little hint of melodrama, to show her I wasn’t happy. Then I walked in.

  She followed close behind me, but when I got to the center of the room and stopped, she kept walking—toward the window that had been open that first night. A few feet away she stopped and stared at the floor, like something was missing.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked, not expecting an answer.

  Her shoulders slumped a little, a posture of disappointment.

  “Wait,” I said. “Hang on.” I went to the desk and retrieved the trash can I’d put away. “This?”

  She watched me, with no clear expression of interest but also not with complete blankness, while I carried it over and set it down.

  Then she knocked it over.

  “Oh, come on,” I said. I reached down and set it back up.

  She knocked it over again.

  “Okay, fine, I’ll leave it,” I said. But that wasn’t right, either. So finally, I reached down and slowly flipped it so it was upside down. Now that I thought about it, that was how I’d found it the first night. “Now what?”

  She stared up at the window frame, made of thick, dark wood.

  “Yeah? I closed it. Did you like it open?” That didn’t require an overturned trash can, though . . . “Agatha, is there something up there?”

  No answer. She simply stared.

  But why would she need me for this?

  Maybe she just wasn’t confident enough in her ability to climb? I thought of the way she always hesitated at the stairs, how her hand always gripped the banister tightly.

  I dragged the metal trash can closer to the window, and then, praying that its load-bearing capacity didn’t max out at Agatha’s weight, I stepped carefully up onto it.

  The top of the window was still almost out of my reach. I stretched my arm to the point where my shoulder began to cramp, and the very tips of my fingers brushed against something up against the wall.

  “What is it?” I asked her. But she’d stopped watching me. She was staring at the hall.

  A few more swipes and my fingers finally pulled it toward me. It was a string, and I managed to loop a fingertip through it and pull. To my surprise, it was a tiny black velvet bag.

  “Ha!” I said, holding it out to her. “I got it!”

  Suddenly, she went stiff.

  “Ags?” I asked.

  She grabbed my arm and yanked me off the trash can. I almost fell to the floor but managed to land upright—barely—just in time for her to pull me toward the door and drag me down the hall and out the double doors.

  We rushed across the hall and stopped just outside the nursery. I had my hand on the doorknob when Laura’s voice called up from the bottom of the stairs.

  “Girls?” She sounded alarmed. Her footsteps approached rapidly. “Girls, what are you doing out of bed?”

  She’d said girls, but she clearly meant the question for me. She reached the top of the steps.

  I didn’t have time to think. I lied as fast as I could. “I was just coming to find you,” I said, hoping words would form themselves. “Agatha was—”

  On cue, Agatha bent over and threw up all over the floor.

  “—um, sick,” I said.

  “Oh my goodness!” Laura cried. “Run into the bathroom and get some towels, please.”

  As I was hurrying back from the bathroom, the door at the end of the hall opened, and Barrett stepped out, wearing flannel pajama pants and a T-shirt.

  “What’s going on?” he asked blearily.

  “Nothing,” Laura said. “We’re fine. Go back to bed.”

  She shepherded Agatha past me, and I heard the shower turn on. So it was just me, Barrett, and a gross mess on the floor.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Your sister’s sick.” I tossed a towel over the dirty spot.

  “I can clean that,” he said, stepping closer. “You shouldn’t have to.”

  “It’s fine,” I said, even though it was actually very gross. He came closer, and I instinctively backed away. I couldn’t even stand to be near him; his presence made me irrationally angry. He was a snob, a bad person.

  But even if he was those things, he suppressed them long enough to clean up the mess on the floor, for which I felt a twinge of gratitude.

  “Does this happen a lot?” he asked, balling up the towels.

  I shrugged. “Not since I got here.”

  “Poor Aggie,” he said, and the quiet kindness of his words momentarily disarmed me. “It must be confusing for her.”

  “I guess,” I said, glancing over to the nursery door. Should I tell him good night and make my escape?

  “What else does she need?” he asked. “Did she throw up in the nursery, too? Does she—”

  “She’s okay,” I said. “Your mom is with her. The nursery’s fine.”

  “I just—” He looked around helplessly. “I feel bad.”

  “It’s fine. It’s not your fault she’s sick.”

  He stared at me, and in the dark, where our faces were shaded, I felt like I was seeing a totally different side of him. He seemed vulnerable. Almost scared.

  Interesting, I thought. Not that it made me like him any more. But it was interesting.

  He glanced away. “Okay, well . . . I guess I’ll go back to bed.”

  I nodded.

  Without saying good night, he ducked into his room and closed the door.

  I waited off to the side of the nursery while Laura re-settled Agatha in her bed and spent the next several minutes fussing over her. Finally, when Agatha was tucked in and seemed to be asleep, Laura left—but she made me promise to come and get her if anything else happened.

  I walked into my bedroom. I had shoved the tiny bag into my pajama pocket, and now I took it out and inspected it in the low light. The fabric was black, but very dusty. I loosened the drawstring and dumped the contents onto my bed. There were three items: a key—l
argeish with a pattern of leaves and an ornate letter C on it; a small plastic vial with clear liquid inside it; and a tiny origami-like triangle of folded money.

  Why did Agatha want these things so badly? What did the key unlock? What was in the vial? It looked almost like a perfume sample, but I didn’t open it to sniff. And the money? If I thought I might be able to refold it, I would have unfolded it and looked. But I’d never been good at origami.

  I crept back out to the nursery, which seemed artificially silent. I could hear the second hand of the old clock on the wall over the desk.

  “Agatha,” I whispered. “Are you awake?”

  Yes, she was awake; she turned toward me—her skin was rather gray, probably from the effort of regurgitating everything she’d eaten since lunch—and her eyes seemed to work to focus on my face.

  “I’ll keep your stuff for you in my room,” I said. “Okay?”

  She stared at me for another long moment, and then her eyes closed as if they didn’t have the strength to stay open any longer.

  * * *

  THE NEXT FEW days were tense. Worried about Agatha’s “illness,” Laura made her stay in bed and rest, which was frustrating and difficult for all of us. Agatha didn’t want to spend all her time in bed, which meant that she needed to be distracted and entertained. I spent hours reading to her from books she showed no interest in—books that, to be honest, I had no interest in, either. Laura had chosen them, and they were all bland stories with a dull educational bent.

  As I read, I would sometimes hear Barrett walk by in the hall, and I’d be overcome by resentment and envy. He could come and go as he pleased. And I hated the thought that he could overhear me awkwardly reading to Agatha.

  Because of the time I spent confined to the nursery, I put aside my insecurities and jumped at the chance to work in the garden with Laura on the first day she deemed Agatha well enough to get up and spend the morning in John’s office. Our next big project was cleaning out the greenhouse, which meant hauling old plants to the compost bins and organizing the shelves of dormant bulbs and boxes of unplanted seed packets. We also washed and squeegeed the glass walls, and unscrewed and scrubbed out the insulation vents, which were coated with dust and grime. After we finished that, Laura’s grand plan was to replace every bit of quarter-inch drip-line sprinkler tubing, which would take the better part of a week.

  Don’t get me wrong—the existing quarter-inch drip-line tubing was in an appalling state and needed replacing. But by the end of the week, the amplified sun and steamy heat of the greenhouse were wearing me out.

  Still, there was an upside: Laura seemed to take satisfaction not only in the quality of the work I did, but in the fact that I was strong enough to keep up with her feverish pace. After the first couple of days, she stopped asking me every few hours about headaches and whether I’d had any odd mental episodes.

  “You’re strong,” she said to me once, watching me drag a pot with a dead palm tree in it across the walkway. “Did you play sports?”

  “Cross-country,” I said. “But I wasn’t fast. I’m not very athletic.”

  “Ah,” she said.

  I had a memory of the coach saying to me, So this is just résumé padding for you, right? I don’t want to push you harder than you want to be pushed. (Which at the time I found insulting, but in hindsight was a pretty reasonable question.)

  “My sisters were athletic, though,” I said. “They were both cheerleaders at their middle school.”

  She smiled, but it was an uneasy smile.

  I was caught up in the sudden surge of memories. “Siena was really good, technically—I mean, her technique. She was thirteen. Dina was just okay at tumbling, but she had crazy stage presence. She was always smiling. She truly believed in the greatness of the sixth-grade-girls’ volleyball team. You never looked at any of the other cheerleaders, because Dina was, like, glowing.”

  Laura didn’t reply, which was fine, because I had lost myself in the memory of watching them from the stands. Dina was on the junior squad and Siena was the co-captain of the advanced squad. She was definitely going to make junior varsity when she got to high school, and I was proud of her. Not because it meant she would be popular or anything like that—at my school the cheerleaders were a mixed bag, cool girls and normal girls and a few totally irritating try-hards—but because she worked so hard and she had real talent.

  Laura worked in silence, permitting me to be alone with my thoughts and the tears that began to spill down my cheeks. After a minute, she clucked kindly and moved away to the table of orchids.

  When I felt collected enough to join her, I went to her side and started pulling pots toward me.

  “Did you play sports?” I asked. I figured she must have some connection to it, if she’d brought it up.

  To my surprise, she narrowed her eyes—not pleased by the question but not bothered by it, either. “No,” she said. “I could have, but . . . forces conspired against me.”

  I didn’t even know how to begin responding to that.

  “I would have been good,” she said, staring steadily at a leathery dead leaf. “I would have been very good. But I never got the chance.”

  Then she carried the plant away, and I decided to stop trying to make conversation. I stayed out to re-coil the hose after she went inside, and when I finished, I was filthy, sweaty, and sort of miserable.

  The last thing I wanted to see, as I came to the garden entrance, was Barrett sitting on one of the benches, reading. He was lost in the book, and I startled him as I rounded the corner. My appearance seemed to alarm him. I saw the confusion in his eyes as he looked at my dirt-streaked clothes and skin.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. As if I looked like this because I’d been in a fistfight or something.

  “Of course I am,” I said. “I’m just dirty.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Where’s my mom?”

  “She went inside.”

  He glanced back at the house. “You’re just . . . out here . . . by yourself?”

  “What’s wrong with that? Are you afraid I’m going to steal something?”

  Instantly, I regretted snarking at him. All I needed was to make him hate me and tell his parents I was unacceptable.

  “No,” he said, looking shocked. “That’s not what I meant. Obviously you’re not stealing. But why are you doing all the work yourself?”

  “I’m sure you’ve noticed that I’m a penniless orphan, Barrett,” I said. “I don’t have the luxury of belonging here like you do. So I try to do my part.”

  I turned to walk away, but he set his book down and stood up. “Why do you hate me?”

  “I don’t hate you,” I said. “I don’t know you.”

  “That’s because every time I try to start a conversation, you—”

  “Oh, like when you accused me of trespassing?”

  He raised his palms helplessly. “I was confused. There was a stranger in my house. We don’t get a lot of visitors—what was I supposed to think?”

  I hated that I heard the logic of his statement.

  “Anyway, I said I was sorry—”

  I laughed. “No. No, you didn’t. You asked me why I was an orphan, and then you said my dad wasn’t respectable.”

  His forehead wrinkled, and he shook his head. He had the helpless look of wanting to deny having said it but knowing it was true.

  “You did. I heard you. You said it to your parents.” I swallowed hard. I couldn’t cry. If I cried, I would hate myself. “I heard you guys talking that night. I heard everything you said.”

  He took a huge breath and then had the grace to remain silent.

  “I don’t care what you think about me. I do care what your mom thinks, though.”

  “So that’s why you do all this manual labor for her?” he asked.

  “I don’t mind helping out.” I glan
ced away. The sun was beginning to sink toward the horizon. “In fact, I should get back to it.”

  “But you don’t have to do so much work,” he said. “I mean, they don’t expect it.”

  That was a lie. He didn’t believe what he was saying. He knew as well as I did that Laura did expect it.

  “I have to finish up a few things,” I said.

  There was a pile of pots near the benches, and I tried to lift it. A few of the smaller ones fell off the top, and Barrett rushed to pick them up.

  “Here,” he said, trying to take the others from me, but I turned away.

  “I’ve got them,” I said.

  Then he followed me to the storage area near the iron gate, and we set the pots down near the older stacks.

  Barrett stood looking around, and then turned his attention to the gate. “This is really cool, isn’t it?”

  I found it a little tacky that he was complimenting the house that he would someday inherit, but I let that slide. “Yeah,” I said. “Have you ever been through it?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t spend a lot of time in the garden. It’s Mom’s thing.”

  I studied the ironwork, its intricate details—the top of the gate was the tree, with hundreds of individual leaves. The trunk of the tree was the middle of the gate, where it opened. On one side was Adam, looking slightly confused, and on the other side were Eve and the snake. Eve’s expression as she studied the apple was probably meant to be wicked, but she, too, looked a little confused.

  Barrett tried to press the lever to open it, but it wouldn’t open.

  “It’s locked,” I said, and as I said it, I looked at the lock.

  A pattern of leaves, and a fancy letter C . . .

  Was this the lock that went with Agatha’s key?

  But why would she have the key to this place? And why would it be so important to her that she would wake me up to find it in the middle of the night?

  I realized, as I stared, that Barrett was staring at me staring at the lock. So I turned away.

  “I’m going inside,” I announced. “See you later.”

  He shrugged. “I’m going, too.”

  So we had to walk next to each other, which made me self-conscious about the frumpiness of my clothes and the dirt on my face and arms.