Owl in Darkness

by Zoë Rosenfeld

  Bert tells the cook she won’t be back for lunch. She heads out into the day, knowing the cook is probably watching her from the kitchen window, wondering where she’ll go. She starts down the back path just to throw the cook off, then, once she’s around the bend, hops across the stream and turns toward town. She pulls her cape around herself and makes her way along the muddy lane, and as she goes, she composes a letter to her friend Divina in her head: Dear Hoglet, I’m sneaking out on the cook—it’s come to this. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I don’t want her to know where I’m going. I want her to think I’m walking in the woods for inspiration, listening to bird calls—some writerly thing or other. Not sitting in the little movie theater again, watching a romantic comedy for the third time. Remind me never to spend any time in a tiny town again: everyone knows your every move—everyone! The other day, I was walking along the road, and a woman pulled up in her car and offered me a ride back to the manor. I said, “Have we met?” and she said no, but she’d seen me around. And then she asked if I liked the honey she’d seen me buying at the market—her sister-in-law bottles it or something. Understand, this is a woman I’d never met! I walk around here as though I’m invisible, but I am seen at every moment. Except maybe in the movie theater, and that’s just because it’s dark and they’re watching the movie instead. Instead of me! God, of all the pathetic, sad things. But sure enough, when I walk down a road, the curtains twitch in the houses all along the way—no one misses a single move.

  In the parlor, she stands by the stuffed crow and whispers into his ear. She tells him about this lost feeling she can’t shake, and about the thin cats at the back door. But the image of the cats deflates her, and she goes to curl up on the velvet sofa and falls asleep thinking about a girl named Celia who had been her best friend in seventh grade. Celia was skinny, lanky, impassive—a strange girl. At that age, she looked less like a girl than like a tall tower a girl had been locked up inside. Once, on a sleepover at Celia’s house, Celia had dared Bert (then called Bertie) to go downstairs naked in the dark and get a teacup from the kitchen cabinet, and Bert had done it, her heart pounding as she passed Celia’s parents’ door. In a dream, Celia tells Bert she’s found a secret passageway and tries to show her where it is, but Bert falls behind and can’t see where she’s gone. She stumbles and trips. “Celia?” she calls. When she drifts into wakefulness again, she is deeply dismayed to be in the stiff manor parlor with the raw day fading outside the windows. The lamp has begun to reflect on the pane—it is just blue enough outside for the room to start to take shape on the glass. In its doubled image, it looks even less inviting than the real room.

  She runs a hand over her face, stands, and goes to the kitchen to make herself some tea. She doesn’t want to wake Allison, the cook, who’s slumped asleep across the table in the back pantry. She stands at the stove, the kettle up above her head. If it were her house, she would never put the kettle away after each time she made tea. She likes the welcoming look of a kettle on the stove—a kitchen doesn’t look right to her without it. She stands there, but she can’t bring herself to take the kettle down from its hook and fill it with water and light the stove and measure out the tea. She’s suddenly unpleasantly aware of how little real comfort the tea would bring.

  The truth is, she’s starting to miss home—not just her apartment, but the scruffy “Kill Your Television” adamancy of Berkeley. Some part of her craves contact with that fist in the air, that certitude. But of course the slogans always boil everything down to a nugget of right and wrong, us and them, and Bert knows that in her own life, falling prey to this kind of all-or-nothing thinking isn’t good for her. Out of the blue, she remembers her ex in a café off Telegraph years ago saying, “The simple fact is…” as he poked emphatically at his flattened palm making some point. At the time, she thought, How beautiful: the simple fact! She’s often longed for there to be even just one simple fact in this world, instead of a mess of constantly shifting, unknowable variables. But she knows the harder thing is to walk in gray areas and not lose your way.

  The night watchman comes by to tell her he’s put the horse back in the paddock; it was ruining the grounds. She tells him she’s terribly sorry, she just didn’t realize. The night watchman gives her a funny look, and in it, she can see she’s fishy to him. She invites him in for tea but he declines. He says he needs to go clear some brush by the fence line down along the woods’ edge. Well, so be it. Letting the horse graze like that wasn’t a great idea to begin with, she’s willing to admit.

  Under a gray sky, she crouches in the muddy grass by the stream, her boots growing wet. She peers into the water, watching wisps of decomposing leaves tumble along in the current. The pebbles on the creek bed are the color of the velvet sofa in the manor parlor, and for a moment she imagines a tiny woman reclining on each of them, half-asleep, dreaming.

  She stands and straightens, steps away from the brook. She looks up at the sky, at the faintest tinge of sun there. Just at the tree line, there is a wan light emanating from behind the clouds. “It lives,” she says out loud.

  There’s an old quilt folded in the closet of her room, which she opens up one day and spreads out over two chairs to examine. It’s a battered beauty in a starburst pattern she can’t remember the name of: square scraps radiating outward in a precise geometry she vaguely remembers her grandmother’s sister explaining to her years ago. This one is done in bits of velvet, silk, and opulent satin stripes, and must be at least a hundred years old. It’s a fine thing that’s crumbling away, someone’s forgotten heirloom deteriorating fast. She pokes at the places in the quilt where the squares are coming unsewn and discovers that they were backed, a century ago, with newspaper, perhaps to keep them stiff. Now she picks out bits of paper and reads the fragments of words she finds: “-NTED: Respectable young woman as Second Housemaid. Apply to Mrs. Clouting, 3 Fore Street.” She marvels at the minuscule stitches made painstakingly by a hand long dead: the patient industry of it, the steady work adding up over days and months.

  She has too much time on her hands: time to consider the cook, the night watchman, the night watchman’s daughter playing with her spooky doll in the laundry room at dusk. Time to think about the owls, the horse, the scrawny cats, the stuffed crow, the rabbit that always darts under its bush at the edge of the back lawn. Time to wonder what the cook thinks of the night watchman, what the night watchman thinks of the cook, what the cook—arms full of dirty table linens—says to the night watchman’s daughter when she sees her in the laundry room. She wonders what the people in town think about the writers who come to the manor and whether she’s about average as far as manor writers go, or whether they find her particularly odd. She wonders what the night watchman’s daughter thinks of the cook: she overheard the girl once trying to talk to her in the kitchen, telling her how she wanted to grow her hair out to her waist, and about the vocabulary words they made her learn at school, and the cook didn’t answer her with more than a grunt or even look up from chopping her beets. She wonders if the girl is lonely, too.

  Bert walks the fence line at dusk, following the smell of pipe smoke. When she gets to the bend, she sees Mason—the night watchman—leaning against a fence post smoking and looking up at the first stars.

  “Nice night,” he says.

  “Yes, it’s beautiful.”

  They stand staring up at the sky for a moment, a slight breeze stirring the branches of the trees. Pipe smoke envelops her and she picks out Orion in the deepening blue.

  “Well, enjoy it then.”

  She nods and steps past him. He clearly doesn’t want her to linger, but she’s tempted to stay anyway just to exchange a few more words. The failing light makes her nervous; she doesn’t like to be out in the dark alone. Pathetic. And all the more so if the night watchman can actually tell that she’s afraid, which she strongly hopes he can’t. She thinks of her daughter Phoebe stepping boldly out into the night in tight shimmery things. All-night parties in lofts
and warehouses and abandoned factories, feathers in her hair, metallic leggings, fires on the beach. Bert pulls her cloak around her and keeps walking, but she knows she’ll head back soon. The dark will drive her back into the house, and she knows she’ll step indoors with a feeling like defeat.

  On yet another cold, foggy morning, Bert wakes to an unpromising day of wet windowpanes and dark trees in the mist. She lies in bed and thinks about the light in Berkeley, hears herself explaining to someone in her head that it’s not like this where she’s from. She thinks of the bright mornings, how each day pops up warm and golden as toast.

  As she watches a chipmunk flick its tail on the wet trunk of a tree, she wonders idly who it is that she’s explaining these things to. She recognizes the familiar tone, the feeling of easy confidences. In a flash, it dawns on her with a chill that the person she’s been talking to is the crow. The crow! As if it weren’t odd enough to stand in the parlor and whisper all her secrets to him—now she’s talking to the parlor crow in her mind. She pictures him on his branch, his head cocked to the side as if offering a friendly ear, and with a twist of revulsion, she sees him for what he is: claws, beak, and two glass eyes; a heap of feathers held together by a crumbling skin. The crow is a mummy with a head full of sawdust who’s been dead since the beginning of the last century. She knows she won’t stand beside him again, inhaling his scent of dust and feathers. With a shudder, she’s pulled up her roots and left the crow in the parlor with nothing to listen to through the long days and nights but the grandfather clock, the brush of trees on the manor walls, the stable weathervane whirling more and more wildly in the dark as the night comes on.

  She’s spent three weeks at the manor and she hasn’t written a word, except for the letters to Divina she composes in her head, and those don’t count. She wonders if the cook and the night watchman have figured it out, if they laugh about her behind her back. Her days would make so much more sense if she were writing—there would be something to look forward to each day, something growing, something building, and, too, something that was all hers, something to remind her of who she is. But now she’s lost her way so completely she can’t imagine waking up tomorrow and opening her computer or even putting pen to paper. She’s lost the thread, and her only choice is just to ride out this strange exile. There are so many hours to fill: not writing takes all day.

  She’s begun sewing the quilt back together. She can’t imagine who else will do it if she doesn’t, and it seems a shame for the thing to fall apart now, once and for all, after so many decades. Sewing is something she can do—not particularly well, but at least the process pleases her. She follows the edges of the squares, joining them, though many of them are so badly disintegrated her stitches barely take. The fabric shreds under her needle tip, and at times the thread, when pulled taut, combs right through. But still she keeps on, sewing tiny stitches by lamplight. After the first day of this, she decides to sew some paper message of her own into the quilt—just a line or two, a short poem perhaps—for someone to find a hundred years from now if the quilt lives that long. She leaves off sewing to go compose some slight thing to tuck behind the fabric squares, but after two hours at the desk, she’s written nothing. She goes downstairs to make tea, sips it until it goes cold, makes more tea. Still nothing. A fly banging over and over into the fractured panes of the solarium distracts her and makes it hard for her to think. The next day, she doesn’t sew, she just moves through the house trying to think of something to say that would be worthy. She knows no one will ever see these words. She knows that if by some wild chance, someone ever did, it would likely be years after she was dead, and they would have no idea who she was anyway. But still. By the third day, she gives up on the sewing project because she can’t bear the idea of sealing the quilt up without tucking something inside, and she can’t think of what to write that would satisfy her.

  It is night, and she has a plan. She crouches by the window with a flashlight, waiting for the owl’s cry. After an hour or so, she falls asleep, startles awake, drifts off, then wakes again and sits there for twenty minutes or more, completely alert. And then she hears it. She clicks on the flashlight to shine it into the night, but the light just explodes across the pane, illuminating only her face and her dark, rumpled hair. The night is as impenetrable as ever. She thinks to herself what an idiot she is—how could she not have realized the light would bounce off the glass? She’s undoubtedly scared off the owl, and she saw nothing.

  She puts on her cape, her hat, and her boots and sets out into a moody gray afternoon of mushrooms in clumps of wet leaves, spiderwebs full of rain. She heads into the deepest part of the woods along a nearly defunct path. Sometimes she has to stop and look around her to get her bearings, but it doesn’t help much—the path is so overgrown that in places she can barely tell which way it goes. She keeps going, picking through the utterly gray-brown landscape, finding her way through underbrush, fallen logs, and decaying leaves. She is oddly dogged, unstoppable; she keeps going even when the path is indistinguishable from the brush.

  After forty-five minutes or so, she is deeper into the woods than she’s ever been and has only the vaguest idea of how to get back to the manor. She stops by a tree to wipe her forehead—she is sweating hard by now even without the cape, which she took off and tied thickly, awkwardly, around her waist half an hour ago—and turns at the sound of a bird’s cry as it flies up out of a clearing. At the clearing’s edge, there’s a strange, sloped shape, and she picks her way toward it through the brush till she can see what it is: an ancient Edsel, doorless, rotting in the woods. As she gets closer, she sees that its interior is almost all gone, the seats reduced to metal coils, the gauges cracked, the floor deep in dead leaves. The car’s surface, once blue, is now the bleached, matte color of the sky.

  Suddenly the stillness, the solitude, the decomposing car seem creepy to her, and she’s eager to make her way back. It’s too overcast to tell where the sun is, but she figures she’ll use that old folk wisdom about the lichens growing on tree trunks on their northern side. She examines the closest trees; their trunks seem to have lichens all the way around. She tries to pick up the thread of the path, and she follows it a few times, only to double back when she realizes that where she’s ended up doesn’t look familiar. She makes a few stabs systematically in different directions but begins to see with mounting panic that she really has no idea which way she came from.

  A wave of fear wells up in the back of her mind, and she feels the sweat go cold in her clothes. She has to take herself firmly by the scruff of the neck and tell herself to keep calm. She tries standing perfectly still and breathing rhythmically, and just as she’s wondering how she’s going to get back out of the woods even if she’s calm, she hears the faintest rushing sound somewhere in the forest, so quiet that for a moment it seems to be nothing more than the sound of the blood in her own ears. She stands for another minute or so trying to hear if it’s just the wind in the trees, but grows more and more sure that it’s the sound of water—the stream—far off, indistinct, but just barely audible. She sets out toward it, aware that even if she does find the stream, she doesn’t know which way to follow it. But she figures it’s a start, and so she stumbles on through the woods, losing the sound, standing still, finding it again.

  Within a couple of minutes, she arrives at the bank of the stream and stares at it as it winds cryptically through the forest. In one direction or the other, the stream leads to the manor, she feels sure of that. She gazes down its meandering curves in each direction, watching dead leaves tumble over themselves in the mild current and hoping for some sort of intuition to guide her. Then, in a sudden burst of resolve, she unties the cape from her waist, throws it over her shoulders, and heads left along the banks of the stream.

  After another twenty minutes or so, she comes to a footbridge over the creek. She stands looking at the bridge, then thinks to turn further to the left and sees, through the trees, a dirt road. She crashes toward it, and w
hen her feet touch the road she turns right—another guess—and keeps going. At some point, a matted dog begins following her, trotting yards behind her, watching her, trailing her, keeping tabs on her as if sent by someone in town. When just before dusk she sees the lights of the manor through the trees, she almost cries. As she steps out of the woods and onto the dead grass, the dog pauses, a paw in the air, then turns and folds back into the shadows of the forest. She bounds up the kitchen steps, eager to tell the cook about her adventure, but when she walks in, no one seems to be home, and she stands limply in the kitchen, feeling lost and hungry and lonely in the silent house, which suddenly no longer seems like a place to struggle to make your way back to.

  That night, she dreams she’s flying just above the manor treetops, skimming the gnarled upper branches, when she looks down at the pond and the stream and sees the little springhouse glowing with a strange light. She sails down through the trees and gets close enough to it to see that it’s full of loose handwritten pages—pages and pages of longhand—each one giving off a steady, golden light. She’s staring at this glowing paper nest when she realizes that the writing on the pages is all hers: page after page of her vaguely European-looking handwriting. And in the dream, it seems perfectly natural that this is so—natural that they’re there in the springhouse, that she herself wrote them all, that they glow. She even says aloud, in the dream, “Ah, so that’s where they’ve been,” before she takes off again and soars up over the trees.

  In the morning, she stands at the stove in a brain-colored sweater, stirring oatmeal, watching it roil in the pot. She has no appetite for it; she just knows she needs sustenance and this is all she has the energy to make. Lately she’s been sneaking around on Allison, the cook, telling her she doesn’t need to make the meals and then creeping back into the kitchen to make them herself. This is something she hates about having someone there who’s paid to help her: she can’t seem to shake her. No excuse is good enough, not even “I just want to cook for myself.” The cook is supposed to provide her meals. “But I don’t need you to, I really don’t.” But that’s the arrangement with the Littlejohns; that’s what she’s there to do. “But the idea is to keep the writers comfortable while they write, and I’m much more comfortable if I can cook.” Allison looks at her with disgust and incomprehension. She’s a slender woman in her thirties with mousy hair, very green eyes, and moles on her arms. She always wears a worn-looking lavender fleece with the sleeves pushed up. In the end, the cook tells her she can do whatever she likes, but she says it through nearly clenched teeth, and the whole thing starts to feel like an actual fight.