These Nameless Things

by Shawn Smucker

  Mary St. Clair. I remembered again that she was leaving, and I remembered when it had been her crawling down the grassy lane, the first words she said, how her name tripped its way out from between cracked lips, how her nose bled down into her mouth as she stuttered, “Mmm . . . Mmm . . . Mary. Mary Say-Say-Say. Mary Say-Saint. Clair.”

  I’d always had a soft spot for Mary.

  But this woman couldn’t even speak, and my fear died a little inside of me. Sounds simply wouldn’t come out. She closed her mouth and stared hard at the ground, then met my gaze again and opened her lips. I found myself nodding slightly, coaxing her to speak. It was like watching a baby chick break out of its own egg. I wanted to reach in and help, but it wasn’t time. Not yet.

  “Go ahead,” I whispered, not able to help myself. I reached out and touched her elbow.

  That’s when I blacked out.

  HUGE BOULDERS SIT along the walls of a gorge. Unrest fills the space, along with crushed rocks and sparse bits of crabgrass and tall cedars that are nothing more than spindly trunks sprouting dead, snapped-off branches. They stretch up forty, fifty, sixty feet to the top of the gorge where green needles dust their uppermost limbs. Through all of this, a woman comes walking, the same dark-haired woman I welcomed into my house. She’s in pain. A lot of pain.

  She looks broken, like the stones. She holds herself in a perpetual hug as she walks, her forearms self-consciously covering her chest. Her long black hair falls down all around her naked form, covering her arms and back, tangled and matted with something that looks like tar or dried blood. Because her hair is so long and thick, she almost looks armless.

  A small dove watches the stumbling woman’s progress, hopping along the top of the gorge. It flies ahead of her, following each of her steps with interest, its head cocked to one side or the other. Gradually she passes under the gaze of the bird and walks farther ahead, only for the bird to dance along the top of the gorge, catching up. But as the woman approaches the opening where the gorge spills out into the valley, out from the mountain, the dove suddenly stops, pecks two or three times at a red vein in a silver rock, then flies away, disappearing in the cliffs.

  The black-haired woman limps out through a fracture in the mountain, and as she turns the corner, finally coming out from the canyon, there is the village and a home. My village. My home. This is the woman who came to my house, and I am watching her approach, but from the canyon.

  What is going on? I stir, but I cannot escape. I see a leopard creep along the edge of the gorge. A hungry lion bends over its prey, hidden among the boulders. A pregnant she-wolf, lean and starving, collapses onto her side, moaning in the shadows.

  I cry out.

  I WOKE UP, opened my eyes. I was covered in sweat. Somehow, I was sitting in the armchair facing the still-open back doors, facing the plains. I couldn’t shake the eeriness of the . . . what was it? Dream? Vision? Memory? The house was darker than it had been before, but not as cold. Everything was completely still—the rain had stopped, and the silence left behind was like its own sound. I could feel my pulse fluttering, and a chill spread through my body, not from the cool breeze but from something else, something deeper inside of me.

  I heard a sound behind me, at the front door. A moan. I jumped out of my chair, still woozy from the dream, and turned. The front door remained wide open. There was a puddle of water on the threshold. The dark-haired woman was on the floor in the water, under the blanket I had given her, unconscious.

  I took a step in her direction but stopped. I turned around, went to the back doors, and closed them. The house grew even darker. I made my way back to the woman, slowly, slowly. She still hadn’t moved. I reached down to shake her shoulder, perhaps push her hair back, but that deep fear returned, made my hand tremble, and I didn’t touch her.

  That’s when I saw it on the floor, barely outside the reach of one of her extended hands. A skeleton key, the kind used in old houses, with a small circle at the top, a long shaft, and uneven teeth at the other end. I reached for it. Her fingers were so close. I took the key and lifted it without a sound, stared at it, and slipped it into my pocket.

  I had to tell Abe about this.

  I eased my way around the woman’s body, my eyes on her the whole time. I justified my decision to leave her by telling myself she would be fine. She wouldn’t regain consciousness while I was away. I went through the front door and closed it gently behind me. The air outside was fresh and cool and the greenway grass was all bent over, heavy with moisture that soaked my shoes and the bottom of my trousers. I didn’t run. But I wanted to.

  There were dozens of houses in the village, including mine, and nearly all of them were empty, but we kept even the empty ones tidy, at least on the outside. There were flowers in the window boxes that we transplanted from various spots on the plains, and we swept the dust from the eaves, but there was no denying the emptiness of shades always drawn and footpaths overgrown. The tall grass from the plains had begun encroaching on our small town, growing high where the walking of so many people, so many old friends, used to keep it low.

  As I walked down to the homes, all the doors were closed, blinds drawn. Dusk approached and the light dimmed. We didn’t visit with each other as much as we used to. I had to admit that it seemed we were growing apart.

  Miss B opened her door as I walked past, and the loud sound of the latch made me jump.

  “Hello, Dan,” she said in her rich voice, her dark freckles dancing, her dreadlocked hair pulled up in a massive knot above her head. She seemed to be as old as Abe, but she didn’t take things as seriously as he did. She floated along, rarely offering an opinion or criticism of any kind.

  “Miss B, hi.” I turned toward her, slowing but not stopping. “Everything okay?”

  “Where you off to? You think you’re going to pass on by without giving me a hug?”

  I smiled, laughed to myself, and it felt good. I took a deep breath, turned around, and approached Miss B on the short path that led off the greenway to her front door. She was a large woman, and she gathered me in. She was warm and smelled of lavender.

  I returned the hug and took a step back. “Have you seen Abe?” I asked, trying not to sound worried.

  “I think he went all the way down to Miho’s,” she said, slow and steady. “You heard about Mary?”

  I nodded, started to walk away.

  “Finally leaving, our dear Mary,” she said in a singsong voice, and I could tell she thought it was just about the best thing, miraculous even. And maybe it was. Maybe it was the miracle we’d all been waiting for. But it was hard for me to see it that way.

  “I’ll see you soon,” I said.

  “That was quite a storm,” she said as I walked away. I waved again over my shoulder, but then a strange thing happened.

  “Dan,” Miss B said, and her voice was different. Completely different. Before, she had sounded airy, light, as if nothing about the day could go wrong. But in that whispered word, everything had changed. Her voice was strained. Her shoulders were slumped, and she was using a broom to hold herself up.

  “Dan,” she said again.

  “Miss B?” I jogged back over to her and took hold of one of her large arms, wrapped it around my shoulders. “Miss B. Are you okay?”

  “Help me down. Here’s fine.” She motioned to the thick grass beside the front door of her house. “Oh, yes, that’s good. That’s good.”

  I brought her down and nestled her into a spot, her back against the wall of her house, both of her hands planted into the ground beside her.

  “Mmm-mmm,” she exclaimed. “That came on fast.”

  “Are you okay?” I asked again. “Maybe I should go get Abe.” I wanted to leave. I wanted to get away from her. I had never seen Miss B like that before, and it made my stomach churn. Her sudden weakness reminded me too much of the woman lying in my entryway, how that woman had made me feel.

  Miss B kneaded her hands, as if trying to rub out the anxiety, and swayed for
ward and back. “No, no,” she said in the breathless voice of someone who had run a marathon. “I’ll mosey on over to Abe’s a little later. He’ll want to know.”

  “Know what, Miss B?”

  As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I wanted them back. I wanted to swallow them and walk away. There was too much going on—what was happening? I wanted to keep everything as it was, nothing new. But it was too late. Mary was leaving and there was a strange woman lying on the floor in my house and Miss B was having some kind of a breakdown, emotional or physical or both.

  “I really think I should go get Abe,” I insisted, trying to backtrack from my question.

  “I remember now,” she said, and I realized that what I had mistaken for weariness in her voice was actually a kind of bliss.

  Miss B was enraptured.

  “I remember what happened,” she said, amazement in her voice.

  3 The Storm

  MISS B AND I sat in the foot-long grass that leaned up against her house, and only after we sat did I remember that the ground was wet. I could feel the water soaking into my clothes.

  “Dan, Dan, Dan,” she whispered, and her voice was filled with amazement at her own recollection. “I remember it now. I remember all of it! It’s been coming back to me in pieces these last days, but this morning I had almost all of it right there, just outside of my mind’s grasp, and then something you did, something you said . . . You hugged me.” She sighed and shook her head. “Something.” She lifted up her hand and stared at her palm as if looking for a line to interpret, and I could see the wet slickness there from the grass.

  “What, Miss B?” I asked. I wanted to know even though I was afraid.

  “No, wait,” she said, curiosity in her voice. When she spoke, it was a strange mix of words, some meant for me, some meant for herself. “It wasn’t something you did. I’ll be. It was something I said. ‘Quite a storm.’ Remember how I said that? That was the phrase. ‘Quite a storm.’” She paused. “I’ll be,” she said, wonder in her voice. “Brought it all back. All of it.”

  She shook her head, and at first I thought she wasn’t going to tell me.

  “It was one of those beautiful days after the rain, like today. The night before, there had been quite a storm.” She smiled. “Quite a storm. But that day, heavens, that golden light streamed in the windows. I looked out into the flower beds and the summer flowers were up, beaming at me, like stars that fell to earth, like solid pieces of a broken rainbow. Mmm-mmm! What a sight.”

  I knew she was going to tell me everything, and I felt myself tensing up, the way you might when you’re reading a book and the woman is about to open the door and inadvertently let the killer inside. It’s a book you’ve read before, long ago, and you can’t remember all the details or exactly when all the frightening things happen, but you have a distant premonition. And you don’t like it.

  “My husband’s name was Carl Bird.” She let out a young laugh, the laugh of a teenager flirting with the boy who is about to become her first kiss. “Carl Bird. Dan, it feels so sweet to finally remember his name. I knew it was there. I knew he was there all along. Where he is now, only heaven knows.” Tears pooled in her soft brown eyes. “He was a good man. I remember that now too. The kind everyone else thinks is too good to be true. But he wasn’t. He was just good. It aches me even worse now, the missing.”

  She wept, and I looked around to see if anyone else was close by, someone who could console her better than me, but there was no one. Only the surrounding empty houses and the greenway and the mountain behind us, although I couldn’t see it now. I wished one of the other women would come out of her house, Circe or Misha. But they didn’t, so I reached over and touched her hand sympathetically. She didn’t let my hand come and go—she grabbed on to it, and she wept some more before gathering herself. She squeezed my fingers as she talked, and it made me feel claustrophobic.

  “Maybe I should go get Misha,” I suggested, but she plowed ahead.

  “That morning was a normal morning, but it was also a rapture, and that’s because we had recently moved out of the city into a middle-of-nowhere place. It was our Eden, Dan. And it was all for me. We did it for me. It was my choice for us to move all the way out there. But Carl loved it too, though he tried to pretend and gave me a hard time. He called me his mountain woman.” Her great frame shook with barely held laughter. “Mountain woman. Psh! He didn’t know nothing about mountain women. He wishes! But he moved there with me, and he flew in this tiny plane back to work, back to the town we had moved away from.”

  When she said the words “tiny plane,” a shock wave moved through me. Like déjà vu.

  “Three days a week he took that flight. Three days a week he was gone from me, Dan, flying in that tiny buzzing plane over the mountain. Three long, stretched-thin days every single week, three short flights, and I waited until long after dark on those days, begging his headlights to come dragging up the lane, through the trees.”

  I stared at the empty house across the greenway. These empty houses had always felt like nothing more than empty space to me, just parts of the past of the town, parts that were left behind every time someone left. But as I heard Miss B’s story, as she told me more and I could see where it was going, the house across the way started to feel menacing. That’s the only word that fit. Like that old house wasn’t completely innocent, like it was hiding things.

  Were all of us hiding things? Miss B had these memories hidden in her like the rest of us had other memories hidden away. Secrets? I had a woman in my house that no one else knew about yet. It seemed suddenly possible that even Miho or Abe were keeping things from me.

  The windows in the empty house pulsated with a strange, living darkness. The eaves concealed crucial things. I imagined the attic under the thatched roof was coated in some kind of mold, something eating away at the inside of it. I wondered if maybe some of the people who we thought had gone east across the plains had actually doubled back at night and slipped into their old houses, where they now watched us through the dark panes and plotted our end.

  I shook my head. Where were these thoughts coming from?

  “Even though he left me in the morning, the headlights of my husband’s car returned every night, Dan. They did. I sat in a chair by the window in the bedroom, and when I saw him coming, I quickly climbed into bed and got under the covers so he wouldn’t know I was worried. Sometimes I pretended to be asleep, although I don’t know why, now that I think back on it. Sometimes I welcomed him home, and we lay quietly in the bed for a long time, listening to each other breathe, wondering if it was too good to be true, this Eden we had created away from everyone. Everyone.”

  Her voice went flat. “Then came the day he left me.”

  The void that had found its way inside her voice scared me.

  “Quite a storm.”

  She was empty.

  “Quite a storm.”

  I would have run for Abe if she hadn’t been holding my hand so tight it hurt.

  “I knew he was in the air already, and I hoped that storm would leave him be. What could he have that the storm would want? Leave him be. Leave him be! And behind the storm, the quietest sort of peace you’ve ever seen or heard.”

  We sat there as if she was trying to re-create that stillness. The cool air rushed around us. I heard a door open and close somewhere else in town, and a voice shouted to someone else, but I couldn’t tell who it was or what they said. The sounds in our empty town were often lonely, few and far between, always distant and fleeting.

  “After the storm, all day the phone was ringing. I mean, all day, ringing off the hook. And you know? I knew something was wrong. I knew someone was trying to call me about Carl, to tell me he was gone, and I couldn’t make myself answer that phone. I wouldn’t answer it, not for anything, because as long as I didn’t answer it, nothing bad had happened. Does that make any sense to you?”

  I nodded without looking over at her. It did. It made perfect sense.r />
  “I even went outside for the rest of the day and found things to do—picked weeds, put together some more plantings, tilled a new flower bed. That night I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, my eyes wide open, but no matter how late it got, his headlights never shone through the woods. Never lit up the window and slid that square of light along the wall like he usually did. Never came back to me. That was a dark night, Dan. A dark, dark night.”

  She pulled her hands into her lap like a child burned. She held them there still as stones, and her face went flat. She stared into the empty windows of the house across the greenway. My own hand ached from where she had squeezed it.

  “I remember now, Dan. I remember what happened to my Carl. That’s why I’m still here, why I never left. And now I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  She didn’t know what she would do? What did she mean by that?

  “I’m sorry, Miss B,” I said, and she nodded. I stood up, but I didn’t go. It was like her memory clung to me, a web holding me in place.

  “What is this place, Dan?” she asked, lifting her palms and motioning around her. “What is this place? This town? This plain?”

  Her voice stumbled as if she had used up all her words. But there was something else too. Something came to me, some strange knowledge, and I couldn’t tell if it came from Miss B or the story she had told. Something resonated with me.

  I knew her story already, somehow.

  I knew it before she even told it to me, or at least certain parts of it. That’s why the part about the plane had jolted through me. I was connected to it in some long-ago way. I wondered if she knew it too, if she sensed this connection I had to her new memory, the part I played in it. Maybe that’s why she had grown quiet. I didn’t want to press her. I didn’t know what to do. So I stepped back, away from her.

  “I’ll talk to you a little later, Miss B,” I said in a gentle voice, and she nodded again. “Let me know if you need anything.” Her eyes were empty like the house across the greenway. Miss B had never been anything but grins and light, breezy sentences. Nothing but cookies and fresh bread and deep, comfortable hugs. This Miss B was different.