Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea

by Sarah Pinsker

  Our quarters smelled like sweat and wet wool and sick. And so many noises! Other families murmured. Babies cried, and somewhere an old woman moaned. The steam engine churned and clanked. I struggled to sleep at first, but I soon learned to tune out the families and let the sounds of the ship lull me. The engine sounds from the deepest parts of the ship’s belly reminded me of the new Bubbe, and that in turn reminded me of my own Bubbe’s voice. I let the sounds blur together: real and imaginary, alive and almost alive.

  I did not count the days, but gave over to the indignities of the situation. We had no dining area, but ate on the floor or on our bunks. We gnawed hard biscuits and picked insects out of our soup. My cooking was fit for royalty compared to the ship’s fare, and at least I had never lost a hairpin into my stew. After each meal I waited in line to dunk our tin plates in a basin of seawater, and in another line to wash my face and hands. I considered the new Bubbe, in pieces in the trunk, whenever I felt too cramped.

  We arrived in the place Father said would be our new home. As he had warned, there were physical inspections. They checked our hair, face, neck, and hands, which the new Bubbe might have passed, then our eyes, which she might not have. The doctors had chalk in their hands, and marked the clothing of some. I tried to regulate my breathing, tried to turn myself into a machine incapable of weakness, and hoped Father was doing the same. We passed the doctors, and the interrogators, and then we were in the new place with nothing but our trunk and our suitcase.

  Father had the address of a colleague from his old university, and we walked for an hour to reach his house. Mr. Levitan embraced my father despite what must have been the overwhelming stink of us. He helped us secure an apartment that very day. Perhaps the odor sped his actions. Still, he took the time to ask me questions about our journey, and he gave me a candy that tasted both sweet and citrus-sour at once.

  The new apartment was much smaller than our old house. That didn’t matter, since we had fewer things. The building smelled like lemons and pickles and cigarettes, and the sunlight that filtered through the windows was more intense than the light where we had come from. Bells rang often throughout the day.

  Father reassembled the new Bubbe. I did not admit it to him, but when he reconnected her circuits I was relieved to see that she had survived her travel without any damage. I listened as he explained our new situation. She shrugged and nodded.

  Father said not to leave the apartment, which was easy since we had no place to go. The new Bubbe was my only company now that Father was away working even longer hours than he had at home. She had not asked her questions since we moved to the new place. Father brought home only bread and herring, so she had no reason to help with the cooking. He bought me a radio. I listened to that in place of singing, though I recognized few of the songs and didn’t know the language the announcers spoke.

  The electricity in our building was inconsistent, surging and dropping at various points throughout most days. For the most part the power would resume mere moments after the interruption, but one morning it went out and didn’t come back on. My radio cut out in mid-song. I paced the floor, at first in boredom and then in fear. Hours passed, and the room grew dark.

  “What if something happened and Father can’t come home?” I asked the new Bubbe. “What if we’re alone?”

  “Ssha,” she said. For the first time since the car ride, I let her take me in her arms. The whir of her inner workings reassured me; she was something the outage couldn’t touch.

  It took a minute to realize she was singing. Quietly at first, then louder when I didn’t make her stop. She sang one of Bubbe’s songs, the ones I had sung under my breath when I didn’t want her to hear. Her voice cracked like porcelain on the high notes.

  I wanted her to sing another, and she seemed pleased when I asked her to do so. I joined her on the chorus. We sang another, and another, the old songs and the ones from the radio, and passed the day in that way. I didn’t even notice when the electricity came back on.

  Late that night, Father arrived with a chicken and an onion and a sack of kasha.

  “Get your recipe book, Tania,” he said. “We’ll have a feast.”

  I shook my head.

  The real Bubbe said to remember with my hands, so I showed the new Bubbe how the secret to kasha was to mix in the chicken fat. She got grease on her blouse, like the real Bubbe. I taught her to say “bosoms,” and sigh, as the real Bubbe always had.

  My thought that day was if I taught her hands the recipes, if her lips knew Bubbe’s songs, then there would always be two of us to remember, even when Father was away. My real grandmother had been my teacher, but this one needed me to teach her.

  “You can call me Tania,” I said to her. It might have been my imagination, but I thought she looked pleased.

  “What will you call me?” she asked. I considered. Bubbe did not fit any longer, nor “the new Bubbe,” as I had addressed her with such derision.

  “What would you like to be called?”

  She shrugged. “You choose. Call me something with meaning to you.”

  I gave her the name Chaya, alive. She was no longer just a reminder of the grandmother I had lost, but her own thing.

  She will be with me always, I hope. Someday she and I will show my children and grandchildren how to make kreplach and kasha varnishkes. Someday they will wonder at the birdcage in her chest, which still holds my old book of recipes and the photo of my grandparents. Someday I will have hair as gray as hers, and then grayer. I will lean over the table and cover my own blouse with flour, and sigh and say “bosoms” with the right note of false despair, so the children around me will giggle. When the others go to sleep, she and I will remember together, and I will listen to the low hum of her, and we will sing each other lullabies.

  — Talking with Dead People —

  Yes, I was the one who came up with the name “House of Whacks,” as in “Lizzie Borden took an ax . . .” Like I was someone who could joke about that kind of thing. And yes, it’s true that Elizabeth Mint offered me a partnership in the business and I turned her down. We were college roommates, and I feel comfortable saying I had no business sense whatsoever. If I had seen the same potential in the idea that she did, if I had taken her up on the offer, if I hadn’t called it quits on working with her, I would be a millionaire now.

  She called herself Eliza then. Made sure you knew it was EE-LIES-AH and nothing else. She had a weird love-hate relationship with the whole Lizzie Borden thing. Her family lived in South Jersey when she was a kid, and she was a Lizzie then without anyone making a fuss about it. They moved an hour upstate to Teaneck right before she started high school, right when that big Lizzie Borden movie came out. The next thing she knew, she was Lizzie-from-Bordentown and everybody was going around asking her how her parents were. After four years of teasing, she was happy to get a fresh start in college.

  Despite all that, or maybe because of it, the story held a fascination for her. I didn’t understand, but I was used to sharing space with people who couldn’t let something go. She dragged me on more than one road trip from Rochester to Fall River, Massachusetts. Dragged me to some other creepy places, too: abandoned sanatoriums, murder sites, serial-killer homes. I had no idea how many people made pilgrimages to those places. At least Eliza’s interest was pragmatic; not that I knew it at first.

  I went along because she paid for gas and I had never been more than a hundred miles from home. Having somebody who wanted to go places with me was a novelty, too, though in retrospect that may have been her own self-interest reflecting off me.

  On the way back from one of those places in my old Ford Fiesta—she was the only moneyed person I ever met who didn’t drive—she always sat silent while I searched my phone for the cheeriest songs I could think of. Then the questions inevitably came.

  “Hey, Gwennie, why do you think there was no water in the swimming pool?�
�

  “It’s October?”

  “Not now. Then. He was found in an empty swimming pool in July.”

  I’d mull it over. “Do they know whether it was emptied before or after he wound up in there?”

  “He didn’t drown or fall in. He was dead already. Weren’t you paying attention?”

  The answer to that was always, “No.” I’d had enough of murders and missing people by then. I wandered through the sites with the goal of learning as little as possible about the mystery at hand. The whole thing felt voyeuristic to me, lurid; to my mind, what went on behind a family’s closed doors wasn’t meant to be seen, much less solved. Instead of paying attention to the clues, I concentrated on the architecture, interior design, gardening, art. I studied the books on the bookshelves, the furniture, the cutlery. Imagined how I’d replicate them in miniature if I were adding that house to the train towns I’d built in my parents’ basement.

  She’d answer her own question after a while.

  “I’ll bet the pool was empty because somebody had convinced old Mr. Haygood that there was some expensive repair that needed to be done while the rest of the family was on vacation. Maybe somebody convinced him that a whole bunch of things needed fixing, the pool needed to be drained, and that he had to pay in advance. Then the family got home and discovered he’d been taken advantage of, and—”

  “That’s what brought down the most popular American politician of the twenty-first century? A scam? They had money. How does that explain his son in the pool, or Senator Haygood disappearing for three weeks?” I didn’t need to pay attention on a tour to know any of that.

  “If you don’t see it, I’m not going to spell it out, Gwen.”

  Then I’d skip to a song I could sing along with, and before too long she’d apologize and change the subject to make me stop singing. She covered all this in the memoir, the road trips and the questions she asked herself afterward, though she left me out of that part. More introspection, less interrogation.

  I pretty much got one scene in the book. In her telling, we were on the Mass Pike, an hour into the six-hour drive back to school from Fall River, when she turned to me and said, “What if we could ask them questions?”

  In real life, I said, “Who?” and she said, “Them. You know.” And I said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” and then we played a round of total exasperation. She tightened up the conversation in Talking with Dead People for clarity’s sake.

  In her version, she said, “What if we could ask them questions?”

  The fictionalized me, with perfect grasp of her concept, answered, “That would be awesome.”

  What she meant, of course, was, “What if we gave them a voice?” That was her idea. Asking questions of murderers and monsters and the unjustly accused.

  “Like a séance?” I suggested when I got her implication, also after a much briefer period in her book than in real life.

  “A séance, but better. You go to Fall River and ask Lizzie Borden actual questions and get actual answers in reply.”

  I humored her. “You could call it ‘House of Whacks.’ Get it?”

  “That’s the best idea you’ve ever had.” I could hear the grin behind her words. For the rest of the drive we tried to come up with better names, but that one stuck from the beginning.

  The name helped focus the project, too. I think her original idea had been animatronic busts of the killers, which to her mind was cool and to mine was a cross between the Hall of Presidents and the Oz witch with the interchangeable heads. Creepy as hell, uncanny.

  She might have stuck with that, but for the fact we didn’t know anybody who made the type of sculptures needed to bring those busts to life. Eliza was always good at adapting to what was on hand, and what was on hand was me.

  Model making was always my thing. First, broccoli-tree dioramas and ranch dressing dyed river-blue. Then whole train towns in the basement with my parents, before my brother, Tristan, disappeared, then every shop and engineering class my high school offered. Making murder houses wasn’t that different; the architectural models I construct now aren’t that different, either, for that matter. People ask, “Why houses? Why not the people themselves?” The answer is: we had a choice between fake-looking models of people or real-looking models of houses.

  I built the first one in the campus theater’s set shop, where I had my work-study gig that year. It was a good job; I liked making things, and I liked that the schedule was a sporadic one, even if that meant I never had much money. Nothing new there.

  The prototype was the Borden house, of course. Not Maplecroft, her later home: 92 Second Street. On all our visits, Eliza made reservations for us at the bed and breakfast that operates there now; she’d book early enough to request the room where Lizzie’s stepmother was found murdered. I’d always wandered the halls with an eye toward the house itself rather than the murders, but once she’d explained my role in her plan, I paid even more attention. The stairs’ width, the orientation of the windows to the day’s changing sunlight. It was easy enough to find floor plans and photos online, but my own experience of the rooms and hallways suffused the project.

  “Jesus, Gwen,” said Eliza when I showed her the model she’d commissioned.

  The west wall swung open on hinges. Every room was in there, in perfect proportion. Tiny replicas of the murder couch, the mirrors, the railings. Functional windows and doors. It stood a foot tall, not including the base, which added about four inches. The Borden house didn’t have electricity so I installed fake miniature gas lamps on the tables and the walls.

  “It’s what you asked for, right?”

  “Well, yes. But how long did it take you?”

  I added up the days and hours in my head, then shrugged. She’d been working on the programming and the electronics for exactly as long as I’d been building the model. She’d bought all my supplies as I worked on it, too, so she ought to know.

  She turned it around, peered in through the windows. “She made all the furniture,” she whispered to herself, like I couldn’t hear her. “Amazing.”

  I had left the base hollow, as she’d requested, and she skipped classes the next day to add her electronics. When I got back to the room after dinner, she was lying on her bed reading.

  “Turn it on,” she said, rolling over to face me.

  Her desk was always a mess, in stark contrast to mine; the model sat in the center, with tools scattered around it. One shutter was missing, which gave me a pang of anxiety. I felt around on the base until I found a switch. Nothing happened.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “Ask her a question.”

  Nothing came to my mind, and after a moment Eliza groaned and asked in my place. “Abby, which way were you facing when you were attacked?”

  I peered into the house, half-expecting to see figures inside. “Wait. Why Abby? I thought you were questioning Lizzie?”

  “When we switched to houses instead of busts, I realized we could put everyone in there.”

  She repeated her question. A woman’s voice came through the speakers. I recognized Eliza’s friend Angie. “I was facing my attacker.”

  “Abby, where was the first place you were hit?”

  “I was hit in the guest room.”

  I giggled, and Eliza gave me a hatchet-shaped look. This was a glitch.

  “Abby,” she tried again. “Where was the first place on your body you were hit?”

  “I was hit on the side of my head.”

  Eliza smiled in triumph and continued. “Andrew, where did you go when you left the house the morning of your death?”

  A male voice now, one I didn’t recognize. A professor, maybe? The voice sounded older than our friends. “I went for my morning walk.”

  “Who attacked you?” I asked. No answer.

  “You have to use a name f
irst,” Eliza said.

  I felt suddenly shy, formal. “Um, Mr. Borden, who attacked you?”

  “I was asleep.”

  I cocked my head at Eliza. “What happens if I ask Mrs. Borden that question? Or if I ask Lizzie directly?”

  “Try it.”

  “Lizzie Borden, did you kill the people you were accused of killing?”

  Lizzie Borden answered in Eliza’s awful attempt at a Massachusetts accent. “I was acquitted of those crimes.”

  The same voice, lying on the other bed, said, “Cool, huh?”

  Something tapped against the window behind my bed: a bee caught between the screen and the glass. I crossed the room to free it. It glanced off the window a couple more times before bumbling its way down the side of the building. I flopped onto my bed.

  “I still don’t get it,” I said. “It doesn’t know any more than anybody else does. It can only say what you’ve programmed it to say. If you don’t know who did it, it won’t know, either.”

  Eliza sighed. “This is a prototype. It can only answer questions I programmed in. But I’m pretty sure that if I give the AI enough information, if I feed it every single known detail about every victim and every suspect, I can get it to a point where it’ll be able to answer questions I don’t know the answer to. Make connections I haven’t made, based on what’s been input. Maybe. And even if it doesn’t, people will buy it anyway.”

  “But what’s the point?”

  “People love unsolved murders,” she said, a line she repeated and expanded upon in her memoir. “And they love murder houses. I—we—are going to make these and sell them to murder-house museums. This one is museum quality. And then we’re going to make smaller, cheaper ones, without furniture or tiny working shutters that fall off when I’m soldering.”