by Karen Brown
I’d thought I was initiating sex—but this wasn’t that. Had it been my fault for being duplicitous? For desiring proof that he was mine? I was afraid, though I tried to not show it. I hurried things along so he would be done. I left myself, and watched him as if from above, like one of the dead. Later, there would be the familiar bruises from the pads of his fingers, from his mouth. I could not erase the past. I had only spun it, like a wheel, away from me. And I had gotten a small reprieve, but now it was back. What goes around comes around. For whatever a man sows, this he will also reap. He would make a joke about that night and tell me I surprised him, and I would think he didn’t really know what surprised was. If he wanted to be surprised, well, I could do that.
22
That afternoon in August, the summer David Pinney died, I watched him walk across the lawn to the barn, the dry grass flattened under his feet, and I pulled myself out of the pool and followed him. I had often gone into the barn to be alone. It had been three years since my grandfather died, and my sisters were afraid of the place, but to me the barn, with its strips of sunlight and its stone floor, was reassuring and cool. I would sit in the little area where I once saw Sister Martha Mary, near my grandfather’s workshop that smelled of milled copper. There was stacked hay for the sheep he’d raised once, the few cows that would get loose on the golf course, old Bonnie, the mare with her large head and frightening whinny. I’d sit on the bale of hay, draw my legs to my chest. The hay was rough and stuck to my bare skin.
Usually, I sat in the barn and waited for something. I expected to see my grandfather, busy at his bench once again, the sparks from the mill flying out onto the stone floor, his pants loose on his bony hips. I sat on the bale of hay waiting, much as Sister had once waited for me. Now I entered, looking for David Pinney. Up in the barn’s rafters, swallows flitted. I didn’t see him at first, and then he stepped out of the shadows. I felt a small misgiving, but I ignored it.
I showed him the old lightning rods, the coiled cable shining like a new penny. I told him how the rods worked, how the cable, buried in the ground, drew the strike away from the highest points of a church, or a barn, or a peak in a roof. The sun came in and out, blinking through the old barn’s slats.
“People were afraid of lightning,” I told him. “Once, they thought it was sent by the Prince of the Power of the Air.”
“And who would that be?” he said.
“Satan, you know.” I picked up one of the rods. “They called this the ‘heretical rod.’ They didn’t think it was right to try to control something that came from God.”
He took the rod from my hand, hefted it, and then set it down. “These must be an easy sell.”
“People aren’t really afraid anymore,” I said.
“They don’t believe in the devil so much?” he said.
Water from his damp hair ran down his shoulder.
“Playing to people’s fears, that’s sort of like that church you go to,” he said.
“I don’t go to that church,” I said.
He looked at the ceiling and the scattering birds, and he laughed. He moved closer to me, and his wet shorts dripped onto my feet. I felt the closeness of his bare skin.
“But you believe in all of that,” he said. “Ghosts and messages.”
I wanted to correct him, but I knew I would only give him more reason to make fun of me. He made a low, wailing sound.
“Don’t be so serious,” he said, and I smiled, though my mouth felt stiff.
He stood in front of me with his narrow chest, his green eyes. He placed his hands on my shoulders. I watched him do it with a strange detachment. Then he leaned in to press his mouth to mine. His lips were dry. His skin smelled of chlorine. I wore Sarah’s orange bikini. She had let me borrow it, soft-piled fabric with beads threaded onto the ties. His hand slid to my breast, pushed aside my suit, and I felt a rush of surprise. I knew I should pull away from him, but I liked his hand there, his mouth on mine. He sighed, and moaned, drew ragged breaths. He clung to me, holding me tight to him, his mouth covering mine, his tongue pushing in past my lips. He stepped with me back into one of the unused stalls, the floor covered with moldy hay, and I felt his hands sliding over me, sliding down my bathing suit bottom, his fingers slipping between my legs. I kicked, and pushed him off of me. I stood, unsteadily, covering myself, pulling up my suit. He reached out to grab me again, but I backed away, and he stared at me, his expression hard to read. Then he laughed at me.
“Are you just a little girl?” he said.
Outside the barn, I felt the heat of the sun hit me, felt the places his hands had touched me. My mouth felt sore and bruised. Later, I worried over what had happened. I kept feeling his mouth on mine, his dry lips. The way I’d felt when his hands slid over my breast, between my legs. I worried I should have admitted to wanting it, and not pushed him away. But I knew I would see him again, and I both longed for and feared that moment.
The next day it was Del and David Pinney, taking turns on the diving board, talking in the deep end, and that night she told me he was her boyfriend.
“You don’t want him for your boyfriend,” I said.
“Why not?” she said.
I told her he had kissed me, and she stared at me from her twin bed, her head propped in her hand. I wanted to describe the other things he’d done, but I couldn’t find the words to do it.
“No he didn’t,” she said. “You’re just saying that.”
I knew that if I continued to object to him, Del would insist I was only jealous. All of our arguments lately had been over Del’s desire for everything that was mine—the little ceramic box with its painted dragonfly, my favorite jeans. She’d been taking my things without asking and claiming them as her own. Just the other day we’d fought and our mother had stepped in. As usual, she sided with Del.
“You always want everything I have,” I’d told her then, bitterly.
That night she turned off the lamp. “He is my boyfriend,” she said. “I don’t know why you have to pretend I’ve stolen him.”
We lay quietly in the dark. I thought I could smell my dead grandfather’s tobacco rising from the porch below.
I was filled with an unaccountable desperation. “Stay away from him,” I said, and then because I’d said it I knew she would not, and it was too late to take it back.
23
New Year’s Eve arrived on a Thursday. Since the evening in William’s office, I’d kept my distance from him. I had become preoccupied with the photographs. In the back of my cedar closet I’d noticed a loose wood panel, and I slid it away from the wall. I’d taken the portfolio out of the box while he slept, and slipped it down behind the cedar panels and replaced the loose board. I wanted the chance to look at the photographs again when I had the opportunity. I had to admit they were beautiful, and I knew I should just confess to having seen them. But the locked drawer, the extent of his secrecy troubled me. Why hide them from me when I had already shown him my work? I vowed to keep my new images to myself. When he asked, I would counter with a request to see his sleep studies. It was only fair.
We were expected at Anne’s by two in the afternoon, which I found strange. It would be hours of visiting and drinking before we ushered in the New Year, and I wasn’t looking forward to another long day and night of the Miltons. I knew I couldn’t look at the girls who’d posed for William the same way again. It bothered me that Alice swore to hate him, when her nude body seemed to luxuriate under his lens.
I went downstairs to ask Del what to wear. The Milton girls usually went out with dates on New Year’s Eve, and Mary Rae had worn, in her last known photograph, a fancy dress. But when I showed Del what I was wearing, she asked me if I was going to the prince’s ball.
“Where are your white gloves?” she said.
She was lying on the couch in her old jeans and a sweater.
“What?” I said. “What are you wearing?”
“This,” she said, pushing herself up. “And a warm
coat. Maybe I’ll put my hair in a bun.”
“What do you mean?” I said. My dress was a dark blue sheath with narrow straps. I had on black hose and high heels.
“For the hunting party,” Del said.
She left the couch, went into the bedroom, and emerged wearing her faux fur hat with the flaps. “Anne has a traditional New Year’s Eve hunt. For hares.”
“And you’re going to hunt?”
“The men are,” Del said. “And Anne, if she’s not too tired. The rest of us will just be the keepers of the flasks.”
Upstairs, I found William loading film into his camera. He whistled at me when I walked in. “Look at you,” he said.
“You like it?” I crossed the room, pivoted like a model on a runway, and walked back to the door. “It will be perfect for the hunt.”
He laughed. “I forgot about that. Do you want me to bag you a hare?”
“Is that how it works? The men kill a harmless creature as a token of their love?”
He held the camera, advancing the film with his thumb. “Marriage isn’t suiting you,” he said.
Where once I might have felt guilty, at fault for failing to be the wife he’d expected, I felt only anger. I unzipped my dress and let it fall to the floor. “I want a white one.”
“That’s a snowshoe,” he said, curious, unsure. “Given the foxes haven’t eaten them all, I’ll see what I can do.”
* * *
AT ANNE’S, THE men and Anne put on orange hats and vests and filed out the back sliding doors across the terrace, towing three of Joseph’s beagles, who lunged toward me on their leashes, their nails skittering across Anne’s wood floors. This hunting party fanned out across the backyard and headed into the woods. Randy and Joseph had brought their own .410s and Geoff and William borrowed two guns from Anne. Anne herself looked strong and capable in her bulky clothing. It was a bitterly cold day, the sky its usual shade of gray. Somewhere beneath the cloud cover the sun shone brightly on silver airplane bodies, on other states and continents, but its warmth and light begrudged Milton and the surrounding villages.
Del and the girls had filled flasks and thermoses with schnapps. When I mused on how hazardous it might be for the hunters to drink, Lucie laughed—a pretty, tinkling sound.
“How else will they stay warm?” she said.
“We’ll freeze our asses off out there,” Alice said.
I’d tried to bow out. “I’ll sit here by the fire and wait for you to bring back my hare,” I said to William.
“Do you want to eat tonight?” he said affably, and I could see his eyes were cold and that whatever had happened between us might never right itself.
We would all have to suffer the outdoors.
Anne had hoped to catch enough rabbits for dinner, and Del said she’d found a recipe, Fricasseed Rabbits, in A Poetical Cook-Book. I trudged through the snowy woods beside the Milton girls, the fog from our breaths huffing out around our heads. We hung back from the orange bobbing of the hunters ahead, sipping from the flasks more than we should have. The woods were filled with thorny bushes that snagged our jacket sleeves, our mittens. The wood smoke smell of Anne’s fire reached us, and over the tree line we could see spires of smoke from distant houses. Finally, we heard the dogs braying, and the retorts of the weapons ahead, and we broke out of the woods to a clearing—an open field of snow splotched with the bloody marks of the various kills. Anne’s voice called out, and the men shouted congratulations, and Randy moved out across the snow to gather the hares. “Four,” he called out. “Good shots.”
“Disgusting,” Lucie said.
Del kept walking across the field, though I tried to call her back, so I followed her. She stopped at one spot in the snow where a rabbit lay, spread out as if sleeping, its eye open, a vivid red spray around its hind legs, and then she turned, her face white, and walked back past the other Milton girls and into the woods. The girls called her. Anne approached me and put her hand on my arm.
“Is she all right?” she said.
Her face was full of color, and her eyes clear and blue. I could see the papery texture of her skin, the way it was scored around her eyes. “She’ll be fine,” I said. “She gets faint at the sight of blood.”
“All snowshoes,” Anne said. “The dogs are good ones. They flushed out quite a few.”
The men decided to stay out, the dogs were excited and racing back into the woods, and Anne said we should head back with the girls. “I’ve got my New Year’s kill,” she said.
I held Anne’s gun and let her lean on my arm. I was leery of the gun, but she laughed at me and assured me it wouldn’t go off. The metal was cold through my glove. The Milton girls were ahead of us, and when Anne and I reached the house, Kitty came out to tell us that no one could locate Del. I said to try upstairs, and Alice found her in the little room with the pine bureau, lying down.
“She’s tired,” Alice said, though, from her expression, she didn’t know what to think.
I climbed the back stairs and went into the little room. It was dim, and I could just make out Del on the bed. She still wore her boots, the treads filled with melting snow wetting the bedspread.
“Those damn dogs won’t stop barking,” Del said.
It was true—from the upstairs you could hear the dogs in the woods, their braying.
“They’re just rabbits,” I said.
“Missing their waistcoats and jackets,” Del said.
I laughed, and then Del laughed, too, although it sounded more like she was crying. I went over and took off her boots and I carried them downstairs. Later, William and the rest of the men filed in—boisterous and red-faced, numb from the cold. They left the rabbits on the terrace—seven in all. Randy and Joseph drank back a few shots of whiskey, and then they skinned the carcasses outside and brought in the bodies—slimy and slick and pink—on a platter. Geoff volunteered to prepare the fricassee, claiming they ate rabbit all the time in England. No one mentioned Del’s absence. Occasionally one of the girls went upstairs to check on her, bringing her bread, and tea, and later, after we’d eaten the rabbit—which was tender, and seasoned wonderfully with fresh herbs—Del made her appearance, like a fairy-tale princess.
She slid onto the couch between Alice and Lucie. Eventually other guests arrived—more Milton girls, more of Anne’s friends from school, one of my own professors, who asked me about work that semester and made a fuss over me, holding his wineglass and his cigarette. It felt strange to be socializing with them, and I noticed that William kept hidden away in Anne’s study. She’d lit a fire in there, too, and he and Geoff and the other men sat with brandy snifters, and cigars, discussing the hunt.
Before midnight, Anne flushed the men out of the study like the hares from the woods. After the usual fanfare—the uncorking and pouring of champagne, the countdown to midnight—she made another toast, and as I’d expected, she announced this to be her last year.
“The last year in this place, in this form,” she said.
None of the Milton girls protested. They raised their champagne flutes with solemn faces. We all sat in the living room, and most of the guests left. William was drunk, his cheeks flushed, and he leaned back in the couch cushions and nudged me with his shoulder.
“Martha wants to take a trip to the old Buffalo State Hospital,” he said.
I’d heard about the place from Charles Wu, who thought it might be a subject for my work. When I first mentioned it to William, he’d grown quiet.
“He’s in one of my classes,” William said. “Charles Wu.” He drew out the vowels in Charles’s name in a deprecating way.
As for my suggestion about visiting the place, William had said nothing, and I’d let it drop. Now he explained to the group at Anne’s that it was an old lunatic asylum, long closed down. “I used to see the place every day when I was in grad school, and always wondered about it. Tell them, Martha.”
I had no idea he had any knowledge of the place. “The main building is vacant,” I sai
d. “It has been for years.”
“Urban spelunking,” he said. “We’ll sneak in and Martha can take some photos.”
Alice chimed in, drunk and merry. “I want to go!”
Randy agreed to drive whoever wanted to come along. Geoff said he’d rather not go.
“It sounds illegal,” he said.
“That’s the fun of it,” William said.
Lucie and Alice were already talking about the day. “We’ll bring the flasks,” Lucie said. “And a picnic lunch.”
I blamed Del’s subdued state on her earlier reaction to the dead rabbits, and I didn’t think anything of it. So what if I was suddenly, thanks to William, the instigator of a fabulous plan the Miltons were all rallying around?
That night I drank too much, refilling my wineglass so many times, I lost count. Everything became a bit of a blur—William helping me out to Geoff’s car, the cold of the car and the drive home, the stars overhead suddenly appearing and sliding around in the sky. I was lying in the backseat, and William was humming something, and my hand had fallen to the floor of the car. I felt among the bits of sawdust, and cellophane wrappers, a bit of cold metal. I put my fingers on it—a thin chain, and then the pendant, and I knew without having to see it that it was Mary Rae’s necklace. I balled it into my palm and put it in my coat pocket, and the car turned along the winding roads, William humming to some inaudible music, the Christmas lights of scattered houses glinting on the car windows. I felt with certainty Mary Rae had lain there, in that backseat, though when and why and where she’d been taken remained unclear. The necklace told me nothing. Had it been William or Geoff in the driver’s seat? Had she been alive—drunk, like me, half-conscious? Or dead?
24
Just after New Year’s a driving storm settled in the valley and wouldn’t leave. Snow blown by a bitter wind rattled the windows in their frames. It filled in the patches that had once, fleetingly, revealed strawlike grass. This storm had the suffocating effect of trapping us indoors for two days, William pacing, pacing, with a pencil behind his ear, his thick gray socks collecting dust. His hair was a mass of curls he kept cut short, he’d always said, so he wouldn’t look mythological.
