I Remember You

by Elisabeth de Mariaffi

  — Woods were wolf-free, then?

  She turned, gripping the towel just under her collarbone.

  — There was something there. In the water. Barking at me almost. Not a bark. I don’t know. She looked away for a long moment before coming back to him. Snarling, she said finally. Not barking. But after a time I wasn’t afraid of it. It wasn’t chasing me. It’s like we were travelling together.

  Dolan watched her.

  — An otter can make quite a noise.

  — If you say so. She went back to her own reflection. I’m tired of arguing with men.

  The fog was slowly losing its territory in the mirror, the counterpart version of Heike widening out and gaining in detail. She fingered her earlobe, the tiny nut-brown skin tag that had grown there in adolescence. One of her eyes was strangely bloodshot, as though a capillary had burst.

  — You won’t come home with me, then.

  Dolan stood over her shoulder, his reflection in the mirror still obscured by steam. She straightened.

  — I will find my son.

  There was a long silence, Heike examining her eyes, her jawline, her lips. Dolan behind her. He reached out to touch her waist, and his hand stayed there. Heike turned to the doorway. The girl, still waiting in the hall, arranged herself.

  — I really must ask you to go downstairs now, Heike said.

  They could hear her feet on the steps, shuffling her way down, and then the long creak that was the middle stair. She’d sat down to continue listening. Heike let the towel drop and began to dress.

  — I needed a place to go; you gave me one. I won’t forget that.

  She bent at the waist to fasten her bra, then straightened, adjusting the straps in the mirror. Dolan watched her pull the white dress over her head, cinch the alligator belt in. Her fingers with a slight tremor. She threaded the buckle through.

  — Is that all this was?

  Heike grabbed his elbow for balance as she slid her feet into her shoes.

  — This? This was nothing. A distraction. Everything in me is for Daniel. Surely you always knew this. She stamped her heels lightly, a final adjustment, and looked up at the reflected Dolan, the mirror clean and clear. I have no more time for distractions now.

  He stepped back and away from her, out into the hall, and she followed him. They crossed into the bedroom. She dragged a stool over to the closet and pulled down a wicker laundry basket from the top shelf.

  — Here, she said. She motioned to Dolan to put it on the bed, then climbed down herself. She started pulling clothes out of the wardrobe and layering them in the basket.

  Dolan stood quietly, waiting for whatever she was going to say next, but she said nothing and kept packing. He sat down in the rocker, legs splayed.

  — Where will you go?

  Heike turned away from the wardrobe, gripping a handful of underclothes in each fist.

  — If I want Daniel, I have to find Eric.

  — Alone? I’m not sure that’s wise.

  — What would be wise? You want to go instead?

  She shoved the clothes in her hands down one side of the basket and stayed like that for a moment, her arms hidden in the pile of clothing. Almost packed herself, folded over.

  — I’m saying you might need a little backup.

  — No. She looked up. No: with Eric, everything is about power. You see that, don’t you? So I can’t send a man to do my work.

  She picked up the basket and hefted it onto one hip.

  — You remember what I told you about stories? You begin with a girl, alone in the woods. So now it’s time for the end of the story, and it has to match the beginning. Some things you have to do by yourself.

  * * *

  They found the new maid sitting pressed up against the wall halfway down the stairs, her hands on the step behind her, as though she’d been lifting herself stealthily, step by step, back up to the second floor. She’d been listening, or trying to, head down, and didn’t see them behind her. She seemed oddly fixated on the front door, staring at it even when Heike spoke to her.

  — Were you able to hear everything, or shall we make a dramatization for you?

  There was no answer, and the girl did not turn her head until Heike repeated the question. They were above her, at the top of the staircase. The girl got to her feet.

  — I’m sorry, ma’am. It’s just that . . . She paused and turned her body to face them, her eyes turning last. I was listening in, it’s true. Only a little bit, ma’am. But then I heard something else, from downstairs. Like there was someone there. I thought it was Mister, come home. I could hear him in his den, ma’am, opening and shutting things. But then it stopped, just like that. And then . . .

  She trailed off, turning to look at the front door again.

  Heike moved to pass her on the stairs, but Dolan held up a hand. She pressed the basket on him and slipped by the girl anyway, her shoes sliding as she reached the wood floor at the bottom. She peered down the hall.

  — And then what? I don’t see anything.

  The girl hadn’t moved, and Dolan herded her down the stairs now, carrying the basket out in front and using it to move her along.

  — It was the strangest thing. There was a gust of wind through here, as though the door had opened and shut again. But I was right here. I would have seen him, ma’am.

  Heike took the basket from Dolan and set it down on the floor near the hall closet. The front door was firmly shut, the deadbolt engaged. She leaned in through the kitchen doorway, but everything was as the girl had left it: dishcloth hanging off the handle on the stove, a single pot left to drip in the rack. There was no evidence anyone had come in or out, but there was a scent throughout the place, something mossy and familiar. Rot, the underfoot smell of the woods, earth and crushed plants and something else, too, something heavier.

  She turned and looked toward the back of the house. The office door was still shut, but there was now a trace of light around its edges. Not just through the wide crack at the bottom, where the glow spilled out in a thin crescent, but along each side. She edged toward it, one cautious foot in front of the other.

  Dolan turned to the girl, now perched on the steps.

  — You should be ashamed of yourself. Can’t you see you’re giving her the shakes? He caught up to Heike with a few easy strides. You probably left the light on in here yourself, he said.

  He took hold of the knob and pushed the door open with a sweep of his arm. Heike, next to him, stepped back.

  In the office, every lamp was lit. The little desk light, and the standing reading lamp at Eric’s chair; overhead, a single bulb flickered in its polished brass fixture, casting a trembling glow. The room quivered with it.

  — Who did this? Heike said.

  If the place had been searched, it had been done with a precise hand. Each desk and file drawer stood open just two or three inches more than the one above it, turning every cabinet into a set of ascending stairs. The floor was carpeted in loose paper. A few sheets still fluttered slowly to the ground, as though they’d been released in bundles from above, or thrown like confetti by some invisible reveller. A hiss and pop from the fireplace; sparks shot out from an open flame.

  Heike stepped into the room and pulled the fire screen shut. In the hearth, a solitary log burned, without paper or kindling wood. Even the ash had been swept clean.

  The room was warm and almost sultry; there was a musky softness to the air, the forest smell amplified by the small space or the fire. Heike had the feeling she was underground, the den not wood-panelled but rather dugout, walled in damp earth.

  She turned back to face Dolan in the doorway.

  — No one would leave a room like this by accident.

  Dolan turned and moved off to the back of the house. She could hear him rattling the doors in the white room, his steps heavy as he searched for other exits, any way for an intruder to escape. Heike came out of the room and found the girl still cowering by the stairs and took her roughly
by the shoulders and shook her.

  — Why would you do this? Who brought you here? Eric? Did Eric tell you to do this?

  But the girl cried and did not try to wrench herself away. She was young, younger than Rita even, not so much a girl as a child. Heike let go of her with a shove and then felt sorry for it. She walked back down the hall and into the office again. The ceiling light flickered. She reached up and turned off the switch. On the desk, the little lamp burned a steady, downward beam. Heike paused, staring.

  The wood beneath the light gleamed. There was nothing of Eric there: no fountain pen, no stationery, no pile of letters to be sorted or read. No files, no papers. No notebook.

  The notebook she’d taken herself, the last time she’d been in the house. In its place, a trace wetness, uneven: the beads of condensation left from a cold glass, or a few drops of moisture from someone’s hair after a rainstorm, after a swim. Heike touched her own hair, still damp from the bath, then pulled the tip of her finger through the little puddle. It was murky, a remnant of grit against her skin.

  She wiped her hand on the hem of her dress and backed out of the room.

  — Everything’s locked tight, Dolan said. From the inside.

  He’d come back to the front of the house and found Heike in the entryway, gathering her things. He was holding a photograph, a younger Heike with her hair under a summer kerchief, leaning against a rail.

  — I found these spread out all over the couch. A real mess of them.

  She didn’t seem to have heard him. She was riffling through her handbag. The girl sat wiping her face with a handkerchief on the bottom stair. Dolan glanced at her and turned back to Heike.

  — He’s come in with a key, that’s all. She missed it somehow. She admits she was eavesdropping. Here he looked hard at the girl, sitting so low she was almost on the floor: Don’t you? You must have looked away and missed something.

  The girl didn’t answer but dabbed the handkerchief against her nostrils.

  Dolan said:

  — That’s all that happened. He came in and out with a key. He’s trying to frighten you, Heike.

  He stepped close, his face tipped down toward her, but he did not try to touch her.

  — Heike, you see that, don’t you?

  She looked up as though his voice had come out of nowhere.

  — It was me who made that mess, she said. The pictures, just me.

  She straightened and adjusted herself in the hall mirror, then turned to Dolan and took the photo out of his hand, stopping to look down at it. She stroked the line of her own cheek, gently, with a thumb.

  — I look almost too young to be a mother, she said. Don’t you think?

  She tucked the picture into her purse.

  19

  She had not driven so far by herself since just after the war, when she’d driven the truck—as she’d told Dolan, packed with vegetables—over the border to where she knew families were starving in their early penance. And even then, never at night. Sunlight, a plain novice’s veil over her hair to lend authority, the dirt smell of raw potatoes. At the border she swung open the back doors and drank chicory while the Grenzwachtkorps dug through the bushels with the butt ends of their rifles.

  Now she was heading north. The sweep of the headlights as she came around a long curve, the top end of Cayuga, where the lake turned to marshland. She caught for a moment the shadow of a bird, wings spread and lifting, but this must have been an illusion. Shallows on either side of the road mirroring in the glint of moonlight or the erratic light from the car. It was long past dark. Even the crows she’d seen down in the lawn outside the house had been quiet when she left again, only one of them batting its wings at her from the top of a birdhouse, the others sunk deep in the grass. An odd place for a bird to rest.

  The bumper had snagged in the brush at the last moment as they excavated Eric’s car—still nestled away where she and Arden had stashed it, and entirely serviceable after all. Dolan with his jacket off and Heike gunning the motor from the driver’s seat: he’d only just let go pushing and then came the crunch. As a result, one light beamed forward as it should, a long, convex warning signal to those ahead; the other pointed slightly down and to the centre, like a crossed eye. There were almost no other vehicles on the road. Once she passed an army Jeep with one of its own lights burnt out, cyclopsing its way toward her. Once she passed a deer, dark and splayed at the side of the road. She thought it was a downed branch. Just the top half: antlers, head, spindly front legs. The haunches taken home by the driver for easy chops.

  Coming out of the marsh, she saw it again: a night heron, rising black over the deadwood. A wingspan the length of a child. She turned south again and lost sight of the water. Farms on either side of her, the road a thin passage between cornstalks, their leaves held out in a scarecrow shrug: What can you do?

  * * *

  The damaged bumper had begun to make a rattling sound. She dropped her speed and cut in along the edge of Seneca. It was not the way that Eric had approached the place the day they’d come with Daniel. To her left there was a rise, the earth cutting away dark and pronged. She could see the run of tree roots coming down through it like burrowing veins. The road turned away from the water abruptly.

  At the axis of the curve there was a brick house with an electric light fixed over the entrance. The light shone down the length of a wooden dock that extended like a long tongue into the lake. She followed the road around until the lake was behind her. Ahead, the grounds sprawled out, the residences with their high dormer windows, punctuated at regular intervals by slim smokestacks rather than chimneys, and the smaller shapes of outbuildings growing on all sides, errant, like mushrooms. Farther down the road, the town itself, called not Willard but Ovid. Heike did not know which had been there first: the village around the asylum, or the asylum at the centre of the village. She knew there was a post office, a diner, bungalow houses where the nurses lived with their families, a creek, a schoolhouse. She enumerated these things to herself, the lives of others in the shadow of the place.

  She pulled the car to one side and cut the engine. The asylum’s main building rose up like a great curved hand, grasping, set on its edge in the middle of the lawn. There was light there, too, from its centre windows, the offices, but not from the residence windows to either side. She could see the outline of the dentils along the high trim and above those, more dormers on the third floor. A turret sat dark and geometric at the building’s centre. If he were there, Eric would be in his office. One of those lit windows beneath the high turret, and Daniel with him, hidden away.

  Outside the car there was the insect sound of any summer night, jaw against leaf, wing on wing. She pressed the door closed rather than slamming it. On the road she’d at least had the breeze made by the vehicle’s motion, air rushing through the open windows. Now the heat held her down. Sticky, waiting for the storm.

  There were no buildings on the other side of the road, but a wide path cut through the trees to a meadow or some other clearing: it opened out round and full beyond the tree line, dark as open water. The woods she’d seen from below, rising up over the road as she came in.

  Heike squinted. At the edge of the path, the shadow of a tree swayed forward, and then kept coming.

  She shrank back against the car. Not a tree after all, but some creature. A stag. No: some other thing, one head piled onto another, seven feet in the air. A man. Some monstrous version, grown large. The way she had imagined Eric, cutting a path through the forest, Daniel’s body slung limp about his neck.

  A loping arm swung purposefully at its side as it came out into the road. The moonlight caught him then: the old man, Marek, a long spade high across one shoulder, its blade making the shadow of a second head. He’d seen her right away, as she stood there in the night heat, listening to the cricket song. Long before she’d noticed he was there. He came across the road to meet her, the soles of his shoes scuffing against the tarmac.

  — Na, schau
mal. So viel Glück hab’ i’, so ein hübsches Mädchen wiederzusehen!

  Lucky to meet up with such a pretty girl again.

  There was a clod of earth stuck on the rim of the shovel blade, and Marek brought the spade down off his shoulder and let it fall, blade first, into the lawn. He was wearing the same striped shirt, buttoned to the collar, the same jacket as before, hospital issue or his only possessions, and he held on to the top of the wooden handle with both hands, flexing them gently, like he was wringing out a wet rag. His eyes stayed fixed on hers.

  What had Eric told her about him? That there was nothing wrong with him; he’d become trapped in the asylum. Her eyes flicked up toward the path he’d come through, the clearing.

  He dug the graves. That’s what Eric had said. No way out once you’re in.

  When she looked back, she half expected to find him closing in on her, shovel raised, but in fact he had not moved at all. He did not smile at her, but seemed as though he would have liked to. His eyes watered, especially the left one. An old man. She gestured to the shovel:

  — You’ve been hard at work tonight.

  — The dying and the dead. They have no respect for a man’s bedtime! He tapped the spade into the grass. Tonight, the earth is soft. Tomorrow, who knows? Old men, we have no choice about such things. We must dig while we can.

  — There. It’s the cemetery? Friedhof, ja?

  — Friedhof. Marek looked skeptical, but then he surprised her and laughed. Friedhof! His moustache lifted and she could see all his teeth.

  The car was still close behind her. At the main building, a light flickered out. Heike caught it from the corner of her eye. When she turned to look, there were still a few windows lit and she counted them. She was running out of time.

  — You are looking for someone.

  Marek shifted, facing the darkness. She spun back to look at him.

  — Yes. Yes! You remember.

  The old man had seen them, the day Daniel scraped his hands against the thorns. He’d seen them together, Heike and Daniel.