Bliss House: A Novel

by Laura Benedict

  Bertie felt Jefferson glance her way, but she didn’t look back immediately. It was time to change the subject.

  “Can you heat up your own pork chop, honey? I have to get into town,” she said. “Book club.”

  “Sure. You want me to drive you in?”

  “Oh, no. It’ll do me good to drive a little at night. Besides, it’s not even dark yet. Will you be home, later?”

  At the other end of the room, Randolph was silent, but hadn’t yet gone back to his magazine.

  “No plans here,” Jefferson said. “I don’t have your busy social schedule.”

  “Your father and I were talking this afternoon,” Bertie said. “I told him you’ve been gone so much because you must have a girlfriend you didn’t want us to know about. Didn’t I, Randolph?”

  “She did,” Randolph said. “I told her she was mistaken.”

  Jefferson laughed. “What makes you think that, Mom?”

  “I just never know when you’re going to be here.”

  “All you have to do is ask me.” He leaned down to kiss her cheek. “Why would I try to hide anything from you?”

  “I just thought maybe there was somebody you knew from school. A mother notices things.”

  “What? You mean like hickeys?” Jefferson made a show of pulling down the collar of his loose-hanging polo shirt. “Hey, you haven’t checked me over in a while.”

  Bertie flicked him with a dishtowel. “Don’t be vulgar, Jefferson. I didn’t mean anything like that.”

  “Still, a pretty damned good example,” Randolph said. “I think we’ve seen them before, haven’t we, Roberta?” He chuckled.

  Bertie wondered if her husband wasn’t secretly proud of their son’s exploits. She hoped Jefferson was staying away from the wrong kinds of girls. She knew what some girls were like. They hadn’t changed since she was a teenager. Back then, she’d heard rumors about even Randolph being seen with girls who smoked and drank a lot. But he’d been much older than she, and he’d stopped all that when it was time to get serious about marrying the right kind of girl. The kind of girl who could make Sunday dinner for his mama, the kind of girl he would never be ashamed of. It had never been a struggle for her to be the kind of woman he needed. It was what she’d been born to, and she’d made damned sure that she kept her mind and body pure, and her fingernails clean when she wasn’t working in the garden.

  “You boys would keep me here all night!” she said, reaching behind her to untie the Have You Hugged an Episcopalian Today? apron she’d put on to do the dishes.

  “Then you should probably act more like you don’t like it, Mom. Hey, is there any of that mint jelly you had for the lamb left?”

  “The Easter lamb? I threw that out months ago.”

  She started to hang the apron on its hook near the oven, but stopped suddenly as though she’d remembered something.

  “Oh, if you’re not seeing somebody, then why did I find this in the laundry?” She produced the detached cosmetic fingernail from the apron’s pocket. “Here.” She held the bit of fingernail out to Jefferson, who opened his palm.

  “Ugh. That’s weird,” he said.

  “What is it?” Randolph said.

  Jefferson held it up between two fingers for his father to see.

  “It’s one of those fingernails women get put on,” Bertie said. “Now, don’t try to deny it, Jefferson. You know I eventually find out everything anyway.”

  “That belongs in the garbage,” Randolph said.

  “It’s such an odd color,” Bertie said. “Who would wear such a thing?”

  Jefferson handed it back to her. “Yeah. Throw it away.”

  Bertie opened the garbage can.

  “Maybe it’s you who’s keeping the secrets, Mom. We should keep an eye on her, Dad, don’t you think?”

  Chapter 34

  “Are you sure you want it in here?” Rainey said, taking in the muted, heavy atmosphere of the room. Ariel had brought in an MP3 player and speakers and set them up on two TV tables they’d brought from the apartment. During Ariel’s initial recovery, they had communicated little, and eating in front of the television had soothed them both, filling up their silences like a friendly, chatty stranger. “There are so many other empty rooms, honey. Much sunnier ones.”

  Ariel walked determinedly backward, trying not to reveal that she was struggling under the weight of her end of the mirrored panel, which she was going to use to set up a sort of private dance studio. She’d founded it hanging in one of the repainted rooms at the back of the house. She hadn’t wanted to ask her mother for help moving it, but it had been too heavy for her alone.

  Lying in her bed that morning, she’d been thinking about Jefferson and the way he acted, like he belonged in the house. Then it occurred to her that maybe he hadn’t been going into the ballroom when she saw him the night of the party, but coming out of it. This was the room she needed to be in, even if it made her feel afraid. There was a secret here. She’d gone to her mother right away to tell her she wanted to use the room, before she had a chance to change her mind.

  “You’re not using it for anything, are you?” Ariel said.

  “That’s not the point,” Rainey said, slightly out of breath. “It’s just so gloomy. I’ll worry about you up here all by yourself.”

  They reached the part of the room where Ariel wanted to put the mirror, and they carefully turned it and leaned it against the wall.

  “Phew. That was heavy,” Rainey said.

  “I thought you were glad I wanted to try to dance again,” Ariel said. “Or were you just humoring me?”

  “That’s not fair,” Rainey said. They had been getting along so well, and she regretted questioning Ariel about the room. But what Bertie had said about it bothered her. If there was such thing as bad karma, this room had to have plenty of it. That it was on the third floor in particular bothered her as well.

  “When will you order the barre?”

  “I’ll do it before I go to bed tonight,” Rainey said. Ariel had asked for a portable barre, one that didn’t have to be mounted to the wall.

  As she watched her daughter set up the speakers, she had to admit that Ariel was moving more gracefully. The limp was still noticeable, but she was using her right hand much more frequently. God owed the girl some kind of break, didn’t He?

  Still, she was anxious about leaving Ariel in the room alone. Bertie had been so insistent. So serious.

  “Ariel.”

  Ariel looked over at her, hearing something new in her mother’s voice.

  “What do you think you really saw that night?”

  Seeming to ignore her, Ariel sat down and extended her right leg for a stretch. She wore leg warmers that covered the tops of her feet, and with the ballet slippers she’d been wearing around the house for a couple of days, Rainey could see very little of the scarring. Ariel still hadn’t put on much weight, but the way her body curved gracefully over her leg—without any outward sign of pain—was very encouraging.

  She raised her eyes to look at Rainey.

  “I think that girl wanted me to see her instead of Mrs. Powell. It was like I was watching a movie of something that had already happened.” Ariel breathed into the stretch another moment then slowly came upright. “But I don’t think you’ll believe me when I tell you the other thing.”

  Ariel had been waiting for the right moment to tell her mother about seeing her father. It was time, but she felt like doing so would cause her to lose a part of him. He belonged to her now. Not her mother. If he had wanted her mother to see him, he would’ve shown himself to her.

  “We don’t lie to each other, honey,” Rainey said. “We never have before.”

  Ariel knew she didn’t have to tell her everything. No matter how angry she got with her mother, she didn’t really want to hurt her.

  “Okay,” she said.

  Rainey felt a chill of anticipation, and knew that Ariel was right. Whatever her daughter was about to say, she would be afr
aid to believe it.

  “It was after the girl fell. After I passed out or whatever, and then went to look over the railing.”

  Stop, Rainey thought. I don’t want to know. The shadows cast by the sconces seemed to flutter against the wall.

  Ariel got up and went out to the gallery. Rainey followed.

  “He was standing over there.” Ariel pointed. “Daddy was standing right down there, in front of your bedroom.”

  Rainey realized she’d been holding her breath, and let it out with a sigh.

  “Your father?”

  Ariel nodded. “And he was here before. The first night we slept here.”

  “Ariel . . .”

  “He loves us, Mom. He wants to be with us. Don’t you understand?” Ariel was excited. Relieved to have the burden of the secret gone. “It’s like we came here so he could come to us. It couldn’t have happened anywhere else. There’s something special about this place. Look what it’s doing for me!”

  Rainey stared at her daughter. She couldn’t disagree that the house seemed to have changed her, but not nearly as much as Ariel thought it had. This, though, was something very different. Since they’d moved in they’d danced around the issue of the supernatural. The woman Ariel saw who wasn’t Karin. Bertie’s fears. Rainey’s own sense of the presence of people who weren’t there. She’d pushed it all to the back of her mind, letting it be overwhelmed by her need to settle somewhere. To be in control. But now, Ariel had seen Will. Just as she thought he might have been with her outside that afternoon. And Karin and the man in the window. The man she refused to believe was Will.

  “Honey,” Rainey’s delicate hands curled themselves into tight fists. “Listen to what you’re saying. It must have been a dream.”

  “No! I wasn’t dreaming. Why won’t you just believe me? It was Daddy. It was Daddy and he touched me. Daddy’s here to heal me.”

  “Baby, why didn’t you tell me when it happened?” Rainey couldn’t disguise her frustration. She wanted Ariel to be wrong. Just as she wanted to be wrong about Karin Powell still being in the house. It hurt her heart to think that Will might really be here, and that she hadn’t sensed it earlier. Worse, Ariel hadn’t trusted her with something so important.

  Seeing her mother’s disappointment, Ariel shrank back. She had thought she was prepared for her mother’s disbelief, but when she saw her mother’s eyes harden, she knew she hadn’t been prepared at all.

  Rainey couldn’t help herself. She could hardly even see her vulnerable, injured daughter clearly. The tension of fighting back the pain and stress of two long, terrible years was suddenly too much for her to bear.

  “How dare you.” Rainey’s voice was tinged with cruelty. “You go for weeks without so much as mentioning your father, punishing me. Every day, punishing me, acting like you hate me. And just when I think you’ve forgiven me, you pull some crap move. I changed everything for you! I gave up everything your father and I built in St. Louis so you could have a new start, a new life, and you never say thank you or I love you. Your father’s memory doesn’t belong to you, Ariel. He was the man I loved years before you were born, and you don’t get to pull this selfish, crazy bullshit on me!”

  Hearing what her mother really thought shocked Ariel out of her surprise. A surge of angry emotion came over her.

  “You’re the one who’s selfish,” Ariel said, awkwardly rising to her feet. “You pretend like you did all this for me, but you really did it for yourself. You couldn’t face anyone back there because you know it was all your fault. You and your stupid stove. You don’t get to see Daddy because he hates you! He loves me, and he hates you!” She pressed forward into Rainey’s body space, using the height she’d inherited from her father to intimidate her mother.

  It worked. Rainey’s guilt reasserted itself, and she backed away. She and Ariel were alone in the room, but she felt the carefully limned eyes of the kimono-clad women and stern, identical bearded men painted onto the wallpaper on her. The big room felt smaller than it had when they’d first come in. The two queer metal rings hung dully above them.

  “You don’t know what you’re saying. I’m worried that you’re sick, Ariel. I don’t know how to help you. I don’t know how to be your mother anymore.” Anxious to get out of the room, she turned her back on Ariel—something she’d never intentionally done before—and hurried to the doorway.

  “Then stop being my mother!” Ariel said, meaning it. She followed Rainey and slid the open half of the pocket door closed with a violent sweep of her arm.

  Rainey stumbled as the heavy door crashed against her shoulder, and she cried out. Alone in the gallery in the fading evening light, she felt physically ill, like she’d been exposed to something toxic. Something deadly. And the only other living person in the room had been her daughter. The daughter who might never forgive her. Never love her again.

  Behind the closed door, a Beethoven symphony flared to life, filling the room like revenge.

  Chapter 35

  It took several minutes for Ariel’s breathing to return to normal and the pounding in her ears to stop. She leaned against the wall, letting the music fill her head. Never in her life had she screamed at her mother as she had just then. She’d felt it coming for months but never imagined that she could let it actually happen. It was only at that moment, in this room, that she’d had the strength. Her mother was wrong. She wasn’t sick. She’d never felt stronger in her life.

  Turning her head, she could see her reflection in the mirror. The light wasn’t very bright, but the changes in her face were right there. Changes her mother refused to acknowledge. Changes her mother refused to see because she didn’t want to.

  She doesn’t want me to get better!

  Her mother used to brag about how close they were, how well they understood each other. There’d even been a time when they wore matching dresses, and Ariel had wanted to be a designer, just like her. Now, Ariel finally understood how much better her life would be if her mother had been the one who died in the explosion. She and her father never would’ve come to this house, but that would’ve been okay. They would have found someplace perfect. Her father understood her, and she wouldn’t be so afraid to be out in the world.

  She felt like she could stay in the ballroom forever.

  Sitting back down on the floor, she examined her reflection more closely. Today, her right eye was looking even better, and her leg didn’t hurt at all. She wasn’t so hideous anymore, was she? Jefferson had said that part of her was ugly, but he was only being honest. He cared about her enough to be honest. And he’d said that he liked her. That was something, wasn’t it?

  She put her left hand in the pocket of her long sweater and traced the engraved initials on her father’s cufflink—the one her mother had found in the car, weeks after the accident, and that Jefferson had found in her room. She closed her eyes. When the bandages had just about covered her entire head after the explosion, the doctors hadn’t been sure if she would be able to see out of her right eye. Her left eye was blurry after they woke her from the coma, so that she would lie in the hospital bed with both her eyes closed. Listening. She learned to distinguish each nurse’s or orderly’s footsteps. She knew the difference between the sounds of the meal trolley, the laundry cart, and the cart with magazines and books and candy that the volunteers brought around.

  The night of the party, she had listened to the music, and heard the clinking of glasses and silverware, and the startled laughter of the women downstairs, and even bits of conversations. She’d heard a door click shut, and then she’d seen Jefferson.

  So, he hadn’t been trying to get into the ballroom. He’d been coming out.

  Why?

  Ariel opened her eyes and saw the fireplace.

  Aside from the things that she and her mother had brought in, the fireplace was the only other thing in the room besides the walls and the lights. That afternoon, she’d gone around the room, knocking quietly on the walls, listening for hollow spaces be
hind them. There had to be some kind of secret entrance, some way that Jefferson could come and go without anyone seeing him. The only doors in the room were the pocket doors leading to the hallway. But she hadn’t checked the fireplace carefully, only pushed on the bricks at its back.

  The opening was framed with a rectangle of red tile, which in turn was bordered by tall bronze panels decorated with bursts of chrysanthemum blossoms in relief. From a distance, the flower blossoms looked like fuzzy creatures drawn by some ancient artist. She loved the photographs she’d seen of the ancient animal drawings on the walls of the caves at Lascaux. Someday, her father had promised, we’ll go to see them. She had since learned the caves were closed to the public, but she liked to think that her father might have found a way to get them inside.

  As she squatted down in front of one of the panels, she heard something brushing the floor behind her. The sound only made her work faster. She pushed at the panel, thinking there might be a spring mechanism behind it, but it had no give at all. Inside, she started to shake, and her hands went cold. It had to be here! She felt around the panel’s edges, hoping to find a latch of some kind. It was mounted away from the wall, but it wouldn’t move.

  Ariel.

  She looked over her shoulder at the sound of her name. Who was calling her? It sounded as though it were coming from far away. A woman’s voice, but not her mother. No. Her mother wouldn’t dare come back so soon.

  The second panel seemed to be mounted just like the first and didn’t move at all. She told herself she could bear the disappointment. There was such a small chance that something was actually there, anyway.

  This time she ran her fingers very slowly along the outer edge of the inch-thick panel, pressing every couple of inches. And that was when the metal gave way, about a foot from the top, and she heard a quiet click inside the wall.

  As she pulled the panel toward her its left side disappeared into the darkness, making an opening on the right that was narrow, but definitely wide enough and tall enough for a person to enter without much trouble. Peering into the shadows, she felt an anxious thrill. There wasn’t much light from the lamps. Her excitement dissipated when she saw two solid stone walls inside. Had she just discovered an old, incredibly lame storage space? A place for brooms or coal? Then she felt a damp breeze on her face that came from right beside her. She leaned farther into the opening. There was a break in the wall and a few impossibly steep stairs made of stone just inches from her foot. Then total darkness.