The Companion

by Katie Alender

  “There used to be a stairway over there,” Barrett said, indicating a place where the waist-high ledge looked patched. “But I think they took it out before Mom was born. Now the service entrance is the only way up here.”

  One of the enormous trees that grew next to the house shaded a small corner of the deck, so we pulled a couple of incredibly heavy chairs under there and sat down to eat. You could see the whole property from here—except the graveyard, well hidden behind its walls and overgrown hedge.

  The wind blew softly, and I tried to eat like a normal person, which was hard because my body seemed to want to devote all my attention to Barrett. A musician. He’d been hiding this secret part of himself like a person hunched over to conceal the soft, brilliant light of a candle.

  “I think it’s so amazing,” I couldn’t help saying. I felt at this point like I was costing myself all of my cool points, but I wasn’t too afraid that Barrett would care. After all, he’d seen me all dressed up in the garden, and he’d watched me meekly follow his mother’s every order.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  I looked over at him, thinking he was complimenting himself.

  “I do love this property,” he said. “But I just like it so much more if I . . . if I know I’m leaving soon.”

  Leaving soon. I forced myself to ignore that part for now. “But you may inherit the whole thing,” I said. “You might live here one day.”

  “No,” he said, his face stony-serious. “Never.”

  I couldn’t hide my surprise.

  He looked almost pained, squinting out over the soft hills. “I . . . respect my family. What my ancestors did. But their legacy is dead now. My mom stays here and tries to keep everything exactly the same as it always has been. But that’s like . . . it’s like if you worked at a factory, and one day it stopped making things, but you still showed up for work every day. That’s how my mom is. There’s nothing left here. It’s all history. There’s no future.”

  “But how . . .” I had to tread lightly. “How can you guys afford to stay here?”

  “Oh,” he said. “There are investments . . . my mom’s really smart with money, actually. And she’s pretty frugal. We could stay here indefinitely, even with more staff. But I don’t care about that. I don’t want to spend my life babysitting the family fortune.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  He ducked his head a little, shrugging his shoulders. “Play piano, if I could.”

  I sat up. “Oh, you could. You’re so talented. The house is fine, but it’s . . .”

  “What?” he asked, looking at me carefully. “You don’t like it?”

  I looked out at the breathtaking view. “It’s beautiful,” I said. “But I don’t feel like myself here. Not that I even know who I am anymore, but . . . whoever I am here, it’s not quite right.”

  “It’ll be better when the school year starts,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You’ll make friends and stuff. Mom can’t lock you away when you have people wanting to hang out.”

  “I hope so. Anyway—I don’t mean to complain. Your parents have been really nice to me.” I couldn’t help veering off topic. “I was so surprised to see you playing before. I can’t believe I didn’t know.”

  “What did you think I was doing all day?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think I do all day?”

  He leaned back in his chair and looked up into the interlaced branches of the tree overhead. “Well, you come down to breakfast and then you go upstairs and help Agatha. You go out and work in the garden, but you’re always clean at lunch, so I assume you shower and get dressed before eating. In the afternoon, you take my sister upstairs and read. Before dinner, you always ask Mom if she needs help with anything, which she never does. Then you go to the library.”

  I stared at him.

  He gave me a smirk. “And you thought I sat in my room and stared at my lacrosse trophies all day.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. “I should have known you contained hidden depths.”

  “They’re so hidden and so deep that most people assume I’m a dumb jock,” he said. “And they’re basically right.”

  “Except for one little secret,” I teased.

  “I’m entitled to one, right?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Everybody gets one free secret.”

  He nodded and looked away. I could feel my heart fluttering wildly, like a tiny bird in my chest.

  “Do me a favor?” I asked.

  “Whatever you want,” he said.

  Kiss me, I wanted to say.

  “Play for me,” I said.

  CHAPTER

  17

  WE WASHED THE dishes and cleaned the kitchen, and then he played for another hour and a half. The music room was small, with a low ceiling. The piano was in the center of the room and there were other instruments in cases along the walls. In one corner was a miniature harp on a stand. Barrett sat on the red-upholstered piano bench and I lay sprawled on an ivory curve-backed sofa feeling like Marie Antoinette. Even the design of the chair made me feel self-conscious—it was the kind of furniture you would drape yourself over, posing attractively to catch the attention of some tasty morsel you were trying to seduce. I was surprised Laura allowed it in the house, actually—to me it seemed to be asking for scandal. (Kiss me, I continued to not say to Barrett.)

  I closed my eyes and let myself float away on the music. But after a while, I began to worry about his hands. Were they getting tired? So when he came to the end of the song he was playing, I said, “Let’s take a break.”

  He looked up, and I swear he’d forgotten I was there. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Is it boring?”

  “No,” I said. “Oh my God, no. But your fingers must need a rest.”

  He sat back and wiggled them. “They’re okay.” But I noticed how he rubbed his palms together.

  “Your mom will be back soon,” I said, reluctantly getting to my feet. “She’ll probably be tired. I should stay with Agatha until dinner.”

  He nodded, stretched his arms over his head, and then sighed. “Thanks for listening.”

  I was struck by the realization that I might not get another chance to sit in this room and listen to him play, and that made me want to cry. We had several weeks left, but would there be more time without Laura’s presence? Without John? Even without Agatha? His music had felt like a connection to something in myself I hadn’t quite known was there—not my old self who no longer existed, and not some mysterious future self I could possibly become. But the thread of me that had always been and would always be there inside me, unchanged and unchanging. The part of me that was a good sister, that cared for Agatha, that longed to help Laura make sense of her sister’s death. In the music I heard myself.

  “Wait,” I said, and he looked up at me. “One more?”

  He nodded again, then waited for me to settle. He watched me and kept watching me even when I expected his eyes to turn to the keys of the piano. He was studying me, and even though I wanted to flinch, I didn’t.

  “Okay,” he said quietly. “I know what to play.”

  He began to play a song that was slow and gentle, each note thoughtful and soft and in a quiet harmony with the others. It made me think of swans floating on a quiet lake. It was happy but sad.

  It was over too soon, and the last note still seemed to be echoing in the air.

  “Did you like it?” Barrett asked.

  I did. More than I’d ever liked or appreciated any piece of music in my life. But I didn’t feel like answering. Being there with him made me feel strangely, awfully alone.

  “It was lovely,” I said, standing up. “I have to get going. I need to—put away my clean laundry.”

 
; “Wait—” he called as I hurried down the hall. “Margot, I’m sorry—”

  I held myself together all the way upstairs, until I made it into the nursery and closed the door behind me. I knew he would never knock.

  Then I sank onto my bed and let tears roll down my face.

  There were no hysterics. There was no bitter wailing, no heartbroken agony.

  It was just me, sitting there, already missing him.

  I was so good at missing people. What was one more bit of sorrow?

  * * *

  “MARGOT? BARRETT?”

  The sound of John’s voice in the upstairs hallway was so unusual that I ran to the door and opened it, breathless. Twenty feet away, Barrett did the same.

  “Dad?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” John said, looking from Barrett to me. “Everything’s okay. You both look like you’ve seen a ghost. I just came up to say that Laura and Agatha are staying overnight in Chicago. So I was thinking pizza for dinner. Does that work?”

  “Oh,” Barrett said, and I felt his eyes on me. “Sure. Great.”

  “Do you like pizza, Margot?” John asked. “No eggplant.”

  I was touched that he remembered. “Yeah, I love it.”

  “Great. I’ll order in a few minutes, it’ll probably get here in an hour.” With an awkward smile, he thumped back down the stairs.

  Barrett looked at me, and I looked at him.

  “See you at dinner,” I said, and closed my door.

  * * *

  DINNER WAS FUN. Without Laura there barely veiling her disapproval of the informal ambience, John was lighthearted and a little goofy. He told many dad jokes worthy of my own father’s considerable dad-joke repertoire (Why do they call them French fries when they’re cooked in Greece?) and acted really interested in Barrett’s stories about life at school.

  Afterward, he excused himself to finish up some work, and I carried the rest of the pizza to the kitchen to wrap it up and put it in the fridge.

  “I can do that,” Barrett said, coming in and finding me wrestling with the plastic wrap.

  “I can also do it,” I said. “Hence the doing of it that I . . . am.”

  “I wasn’t trying to imply that you can’t,” he said.

  “Just that I shouldn’t be oppressed by your parents’ insistence that I personally wrap all the leftover food.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “Fight the power.”

  “The power bought me dinner,” I said. “So I can put the dinner away.”

  “Well, I can take the box to the trash,” he said, snatching it off the counter and disappearing. He seemed to be gone for a long time, and I grew uneasy. Finally, I’d given up and started back toward the nursery. I hadn’t shed the melancholy that had settled on me, and it made me sensitive to every detail of our interactions. I began to think his long absence was intentional.

  “Margot, wait, please,” he said, jogging down the hall behind me. This time, unlike earlier, he caught up. “Sorry, the box didn’t fit in the normal trash. I had to take it over to the garage . . . I was wondering if you wanted to go for a walk.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Just around,” he said. “Not to any specific place to do any specific thing—”

  “Oh, we can water the bulbs,” I said.

  He laughed. “Or that.”

  “I’ll go get the key,” I said.

  * * *

  WE EMERGED FROM the house into a world on the verge of nightfall. The sky was darkening swiftly, the last gasps of sunlight shooting into the clouds and painting them shades of rose pink and orange.

  We were strangely quiet as we made our way out through the garden and into the graveyard. I think we were contemplating the absolute insanity that could ensue if we ever admitted that we wanted to be together in any way. I know I was.

  After my conversation with Laura, the names on the gravestones suddenly made sense, which also made them supremely creepy. Abel? Yes, I remembered Abel. Well, here he is. Loretta, the old battle-ax. Here she is. Agatha (a.k.a. Maude), Matthew. Here they all were, arrayed in orderly, picturesque little graves, spread out among the trees yet still all part of the whole.

  But not Lily. Her grave was one curve of the path too far from the others. Maybe they’d decided to start the new generation back here, spread things out a little. That made me imagine the current generation of Suttons lying still and silent underground someday, their bodies cold and their muscles melting away, bones fading to dust, and that turned my stomach.

  “Are you okay?” Barrett asked.

  “I really don’t like it in here,” I said.

  “Yeah, me neither,” he said. “Should we go?”

  “It’s okay,” I said. I carried a hose looped over my shoulder, one of the extras from the back of the greenhouse, and I planned to hook it up to one of the spigots that had been installed by whoever built the wall.

  We rounded the corner and I was busy inspecting the rubber washer at the end of the hose. I hoped it wasn’t too corroded. The dry rot got to the rubber if you didn’t keep it moist enough.

  “Margot,” Barrett said, quietly and quickly.

  “Yeah?” I asked, turning to face him. But halfway through the turn, I stopped.

  I stared.

  “No,” Barrett said. “Right?”

  He meant, No way are we seeing what we think we’re seeing.

  The bulbs we had planted the previous night, if we were lucky, should have been soaking in water and getting a feel for the warmth and weight of the soil. If all went according to plan, in about two weeks, the first tiny green shoots should creep out of the papery layers of the bulb and poke out of the soil. In a month, maybe a plant would be on its way to flowering.

  But now—less than a full day later—the grave was completely surrounded by brilliant dark red lilies, fully grown and open, yawning and leaning and swaying on their slender stems. Their leaves, like oversize blades of grass, bent gracefully toward the ground.

  “No way,” I said.

  This was a complete impossibility. This was the kind of thing that didn’t happen in reality.

  “I don’t understand,” Barrett said. He knelt to inspect one of the flowers, lightly touching its velvet-soft petal as if he half expected it to snap shut on his fingers.

  I knelt next to him, feeling weirdly afraid.

  “It’s like magic,” I whispered, and then I stood up and backed away.

  Barrett stayed there, looking at the grave, which now seemed so small—like a child’s bed, its edges defined by the lush crowd of lilies.

  Then he looked over his shoulder at me and laughed in amazement, and for a moment the sound of it transported me back through time to my old life, days spent sitting in the cafeteria at school with Becca and CJ and the others, the hum of happy/stressed/tired chatter all around us. And punctuating it from random corners of the room, laughter. Warm, bright, happy laughter.

  “How could this have happened overnight?” Barrett asked.

  I didn’t answer. I stared in wonder at the sight. The flowers were beautiful, a deep burgundy with yellow centers and ruffles along the edges of their petals.

  A hush seemed to fall over the garden, over us.

  The evening’s last light edging in over the wall had turned dazzling gold. It shone on Barrett’s face and turned him into a bronze statue.

  “This house . . .” I said.

  He came closer. “What about it?”

  “Did you like growing up here?”

  “It’s what I knew,” he said. “I thought it was normal.”

  “When I first came here, I thought your mom was just kind of anxious,” I said.

  “She is,” he said.

  “No, but . . . it’s more than that. It’s like she’s worried all the time. It’s not
just about Agatha.”

  “You think that has something to do with her sister dying?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Depends on how she died.”

  “We never played with other kids,” Barrett said thoughtfully. “And when we did, we weren’t allowed to go into the closed-off wings. Mom’s big on not letting the cold air out, or the hot air in, or whatever, I don’t know.” He frowned, his forehead creasing. “I had one friend for a while—a kid we met at the grocery store in town. I basically forced Mom to invite him over. His mother drove him here, and the moms sat and talked while we played. We were having fun, but Mom called for us and we didn’t come right away—and then she yelled at us both. So his mom got mad at my mom, and we never saw them again.”

  “Why did she yell?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “At the time I didn’t know. But there are a lot of weird things in a house like this. Exposed wiring, random places you could get stuck. There used to be a dumbwaiter, like a tiny elevator, in the storage room off the kitchen—well, it’s still there but we don’t use it. Apparently when my grandfather was a kid, one of the maids lost a finger trying to send a mop and bucket to the second floor, and Mom forbade us from even opening the doors. She caught me trying to climb in once and freaked out. Like, shaking, she was so scared.”

  “Sometimes I wonder how everybody’s not scared all the time,” I said. “When you have a family you love and everybody leaves the house in the morning—don’t you think, What if that’s the last time I ever see them?”

  He was frowning deeply. “I never did before. But . . . when Agatha got sick, I think I did feel that way. Only it was too late. The last time I talked to her, we were arguing. And then it was like she changed into a different person. I go over that conversation in my head every day.”

  “What were you arguing about?”

  He seemed to stare directly into the orange light, which was quickly fading and leaving a pale indigo shadow in its place. “She was sneaking away from school for the weekend—she’d forged herself a permission slip and she and her friends went to somebody’s lake house. I told her not to go. And then she fell off the dock and cut her foot, and the doctors think some weird bacteria got into her bloodstream. She came home so Mom could keep an eye on her, and she never got better. That was October . . . by the time I got home for Christmas, she was . . . like she is now.” He stared at the ground. “They said she’s lucky she didn’t lose her arms and legs—or die. But she lost plenty.”