The Appearance of Annie Van Sinderen

by Katherine Howe

  “See?” he says.

  It certainly feels like a real elbow. I look at him warily. I’m not sure if I want him to be real or not. There’s something disconcerting, about being so at ease with a boy I’ve just met. But then, if he is real, perhaps he can help me sort out what’s going on. He doesn’t seem troubled by the fog in the slightest. Fog does happen, from time to time. And it can be very disorienting. Ships dash themselves on rocks all the time, when they get lost in the fog. What if nothing is wrong with me at all? What if I’m experiencing nothing more odious than the strange intersection of weather and Madeira after a night’s revels?

  A slender thread of relief unwinds inside me, as if he’d found the loose end and is pulling to unravel an ugly shawl in my soul. I laugh at the pleasure of it, and poke him in the ribs in return.

  “So how did you find me?” I want to know. “Wes.”

  I certainly haven’t heard his name before. It sounds strange to me, or made up, but then a lot of the boys and girls in other neighborhoods have names that sound strange to someone whose family was English or Dutch. I’d never heard the name Herschel before, either.

  “It wasn’t easy,” he says, leaning in as if to draw me into a conspiracy. “Given that I don’t know your name.”

  Oh, figment. You think you are so clever.

  “Wes,” I repeat, to let him know that I see through his transparent ruse. “Is that a nickname?”

  “Maybe,” he replies, and waggles his eyebrows like the villain in a play.

  I look him full in the face, smiling, not saying anything, letting him know in no uncertain terms that I expect him to tell me his real name before I tell him mine. But he’s waiting, too, and looking back at me just as frankly. A long challenging minute passes with us staring into each other’s eyes. The minute goes on too long, begins to make me nervous, but then we both collapse in laughter.

  “So, listen,” he says. “This may sound really weird, but I did have to find you.”

  “Weird?” I say, puzzled. I’m not used to hearing that word used so casually. Weird means magical, like the weird sisters in Macbeth.

  He doesn’t see why I’m confused, though.

  “I mean. It’s not a big deal or anything,” he continues, mollifying me. But his manner of speaking sounds odd, to my ears. I know the words he uses, but they seem wrong somehow.

  He produces a funny-looking saddlebag, fastened in a way I haven’t seen. He opens it and roots around inside. After a minute he produces a sheet of notepaper and he attempts to smooth out the creases before handing it to me.

  “I just need you to sign this. I’m sorry. I should have done it when I was here before.”

  I stare at the paper. It looks something like a bill of sale, not that I’ve ever had to sign one before. It uses the word “whereas” a lot, and talks about rights to “the image, now and in perpetuity, in any manner of storage or retrieval now extant or devised in the future.”

  But the words aren’t the strangest part.

  The words are typeset.

  Papa’s bank contracts are well drawn by his clerks, but they’re never typeset. And the paper is so smooth and white it doesn’t look real.

  I have no idea what it means. I look at him quizzically.

  “I mean”—his cheeks are burning bright pink, which I find rather charming—“I’m just as glad I didn’t. Remember to get you to sign it, I mean. Before. Because then I had to . . .”

  He can’t finish his thought, so caught up is he in staring at me. Herschel wouldn’t like it, seeing another boy stare at me so. I shouldn’t like it, either. But I do. I feel like I glisten when Wes looks at me like that. I wait, not sure what I should do.

  “Anyway,” Wes continues in a rush, breaking his gaze and turning back to his saddlebag for escape. “Here.”

  He produces a funny little object that’s like one of Mother’s gilt pencils, only not made of wood. It’s not made of metal, either. I weigh it in my hand. It’s light, like a stripped quill, only without any ink. A pen, clearly, but of some kind I haven’t seen.

  “Sign?” I say. As if my signing anything would make any difference to anyone. Under the law, I’m not even a person. “But what is it?”

  I must look more perturbed than I even realize, because all at once his gray eyes darken, and he looks around us quickly as though we’re being watched. My scalp tightens with sudden anxiety. I think fleetingly of the contract signed in Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus. Typical, of a young girl being dramatic, I chastise myself.

  “Seriously. Is everything okay?” he whispers in my ear.

  I stare at him, baffled by this question. That word again.

  “Is . . . everything . . . okay.” I try out the words for myself. “Oh. Kay.”

  He presses himself nearer to me, and his skin feels warm next to mine. It feels good, having him here with me. Safe.

  “Is it?” he insists. He puts an arm around my shoulder and gives me a squeeze, the kind of squeeze that would be too familiar if it were from almost anyone else. “You can trust me. It’s okay.”

  I don’t know why, but this boy feels wonderfully necessary. He looks at me with such soft attention, and when he leans in close to me, I don’t worry so much about the fog. I don’t feel so lost. I don’t even care if he’s imaginary.

  A smile spreads across my face and I say, “It caps the climax. Got any ink?”

  Now it’s his turn to look confused. My figment doesn’t use idioms, apparently. It could be that my figment isn’t very bright. “Um. What?”

  “Ink?” I wave the stripped quill at him. “You want me to sign it, don’t you?”

  “Well, yeah, but . . . ,” he stammers, as if he doesn’t know how to answer my incredibly obvious question.

  “Annatje?” I almost hear someone call from inside the house. The faint sound, fainter than a leaf falling on the ground, sends a chill across the back of my neck, down my spine, all the way to my slippers on the paving stones.

  I sit stock-still, my ears straining to decipher if I really heard it, or if it’s another game my mind is playing with itself.

  “Are you—” Wes starts to say, but I can’t have him talking to me until I discover if I heard my name. I make a hushing sound and silence him with my fingertips against his lips. They are warm and soft.

  “Shhh,” I whisper. Obediently he stops, eyebrows raised with curiosity.

  My ears ring with the strain of listening through the silence, and I stare hard at Ed’s bedroom window upstairs.

  The window sash is open, and the corner of a gauzy curtain drifts over the lip of the window and waves slowly in the air like a hand.

  Inside the house, I hear the faintest sounds of movement. Footsteps, or the scraping of a chair across the floor. It’s not even a sound, exactly, more a vibration. I can tell that they’re inside. They’re inside!

  And then I hear it again.

  “Annatje?” my mother clearly calls. I hear her through Ed’s window, as though she’s looking for me upstairs.

  I leap to my feet.

  “I’m sorry,” I stammer to my disappointed-looking figment. His eyebrows have risen higher and are meeting in a sorry little point above his nose. “I’m sorry, Wes, I’ve got to go. That’s my mother.”

  “Your—what?” He glances quickly at the façade of my town house with a look of utter confusion.

  I’m already at the front door. It’s as real and solid and wooden as ever it was. There’s even a chip in the black paint left by the knifepoint, showing the raw wood underneath. But the note has disappeared. I have my hand on the knob, and it’s unlocked, and I have one foot on the doorsill.

  Wes has scrambled to his feet.

  “My mother,” I explain, impatient. “I’m sorry, I have to go.”

  “But—” Wes’s voi
ce breaks, and he reaches a hand toward me. “Hey. Listen. I’m sorry, look, I know you don’t know me, but I really need your help with this.”

  I pause, the door open, and it seems impossible that I can still be talking to him when I have to go inside right now and see my mother.

  “Help?” I say.

  “Annatje!” my mother shouts down the curve of the staircase, sharper and more urgently. “I need you right now!”

  I glance up to where she’ll appear on the stair any minute. It’s clear something is wrong. It must be the letter. Papa’s read the letter.

  “Please?” wheedles my figment.

  In a flash I’m angry with him. Can’t he see that I have to go? But he’s such a warm figment, and the corners of his eyes look moist and his eyelashes are trembling.

  “I . . .” I hesitate, unsure what to do.

  “Look,” he reasons. “If you have to go right now, I can just wait. Okay? You go do whatever, and I’ll just wait down here. It’s no big deal. I mean. You won’t be long, right?”

  “Um . . .” I can’t tell how long I’ll be. How can I know? I hear my mother’s footsteps in the hall overhead, and the door to my father’s study slam. Running feet in the hallway between my siblings’ rooms. It’s the day of the letter, and I have to go.

  “Please?” Wes whispers to me. His eyes are yearning, his hand crumpling the paper that he was trying to show me.

  I’m inside the front hall now, my hand on the banister, and the hall is just as it should be, with the hat stand and the carpet runner. Perhaps I won’t be as long as all that. I have to go see Herschel before we flee to Hudson Square, because Herschel hasn’t given me the cameo yet. If Wes walks with me, I’ll be safer, in the street. And the truth is, I crave that stolid boy warmth next to me. That crinkling smile of his. His funny wrong words. Is it wrong, to be escorted through the streets by one boy on the way to meet another?

  “All right,” I whisper to him so that Mother won’t hear.

  The one time Mother spied me talking to Herschel, I spent two days locked in my bedroom and Beattie slept on the trundle in Mother’s room. I still have a pale stripe on my left hip, from where the welt healed. I can’t have her see me talking to some strange overgrown boy in short pants.

  “Wait down there,” I say in my lowest voice. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “Okay.” Wes grins in a way both winning and foolish, like a puppy with a pullet in its mouth. I grin back. So maybe Wes shouldn’t walk me all the way to Herschel’s shop. Maybe he can take me ’til I’m a block away, and I can carry on alone thereafter. “Okay. I’ll be right here.”

  My feet newly light, I start up the stairs to where my mother is waiting.

  “Wait!” Wes shouts, and I freeze where I’m standing and give him a deadly look. I can’t have Mother and Papa knowing about him. He has to be quiet.

  “I don’t know your name.” The words tumble out of my figment in a rush of explanation and excuse. “What’s your name?”

  I consider the question, and then bestow on him my most excellent smile.

  “Annie,” I whisper. “I’m Annie.”

  I just have time to see his entire face break open in a dazzling grin.

  Then the door slams behind me on a passing breeze, shaking the walls of the town house as I hurry up the stairs.

  “Mother!” I shout. “Mother, I’m here!”

  CHAPTER 5

  Mother’s face is pale and drawn when she looks down at me over the banister. She’s just come out of Papa’s study.

  “There you are,” she says, and her grip tightens on the handrail.

  “I’m sorry,” I rush to apologize, but I don’t know what I’m apologizing for.

  Mother’s eyes narrow at me, and when I reach the top of the stairs she takes hold of my sleeve and pushes me up against the wall.

  “Listen to me,” she says in a voice so quiet it fills me with dread. “I want you to go into your bedroom and help your sister pack.”

  “Pack?” I repeat, but of course I know exactly what she’s talking about. She’s talking about the letter. “Is Lottie helping her?”

  “Lottie’s gone home,” Mother says.

  “Home?” I ask. “But for how long?”

  Lottie is from a mean smattering of huts in the countryside far up the island, a hardscrabble village named Seneca. No one knows why it has an Indian name, since I don’t think any Indians live there. I’ve never actually been, and Lottie won’t tell me about it. She hates to go back home, though she’ll never say why. Lottie doesn’t like talking about herself with us as a rule. Winston is from there, too, though, and goes home some Sundays, when Mother and Papa let him get away. Sometimes his wife’s owner will let her and the children go there, too, but rarely. Winston gets a faraway look on his face, when one of those home-going Sundays is coming. He has a small parcel of land of his own, with a tiny house that he built, covered with wooden shingles that he split. Winston is free, and always was, as far as I know, but not so many freedmen can buy land. Even land no one else wants but the Irish.

  “I don’t know,” Mother hisses through clenched teeth. “Now hurry. Winston’s going to drive us in half an hour.”

  She shoves me through the door of my bedroom and then hurries down the hall back to Papa’s study.

  Beattie is nowhere to be seen, though there’s a heap of finery and coats on our still-listing bed. I hear drawers opening and closing in Ed’s room next door. I stand alone in the center of the room, my skirts in my hands, vibrating with indecision.

  “Dammit, Eleanor!” an angry male voice shouts through closed doors.

  My mouth goes dry.

  I never knew what the letter said. But in this shadow version of my past, this bizarre reliving of a day that already happened, perhaps I can find out.

  On silent cat feet, I creep out of my bedroom and down the hall, careful to avoid the creaky board at the head of the stairs. Papa’s study is at the front of the house, overlooking First Street, next to Ed’s room. I reach his closed door and, holding my breath, lean down until my ear hovers just next to the keyhole. One hand tucks my pigtail behind my ear.

  Papa and Mother are both inside, with at least two other men.

  “. . . let them threaten us like this,” Papa is in the middle of saying.

  “Peter,” my mother says in her cold and reasonable voice. “Nothing has to change. The flotilla is underway. The celebration will go on. Nothing will stop it.”

  “Do you know what the governor will do, if he hears the threats are escalating?” one of the unseen men says.

  “There’s nothing to do,” my mother insists. “The canal will open. The corporation will succeed. There’s no stopping it, even if the governor wanted to. Which he does not.”

  “I don’t know,” my father says.

  He sounds weary. There’s a creak, as of someone sitting down heavily in a desk chair. Footsteps cross the room, and a shadow moves over my face where I hover, listening.

  “In any case,” another male voice says, “they’ll soon see it’s for the best. These agitators act from fear. They’re essentially ignorant.”

  “Indeed,” my father agrees. A long pause wears by while we all wait to hear what he might say next.

  “When they see how cheap corn gets, the violence will stop. It stands to benefit the paupers most of all, anyhow,” the other man remarks.

  “We might tell the governor in any case,” my father says at length.

  A thrumming of tension swells throughout the room.

  “But, Mr. Van Sinderen,” the younger of the two men says. “We don’t want to distract him. It’s only your . . .” He stops himself, aware that my mother is listening to him with icy attention. He clears his throat. “I’m sorry, madam. But it’s only your family that’s received the threats.”

 
“What are you suggesting?” my father growls.

  “Well,” the unseen man demurs. “It’s possible that the . . . don’t you at least think that perhaps . . .”

  “Spit it out already!” my father shouts.

  “He thinks it’s a private quarrel, Peter,” my mother says, and the timbre of her voice turns me to glass. “That this . . . brotherhood, or whatever it is . . . isn’t trying to scuttle the corporation. They’re trying to scuttle you.”

  Another creak as my father rises from his seat and stalks across the room.

  “In which case,” his young corporation colleague continues, “we see no reason to bother the governor. Provided your family’s security is sure, of course.”

  “Which we’re prepared to arrange,” the other corporation functionary hastens to add. “At our expense. At least until the canal is officially open.”

  “These crackbrains!” my father explodes, pounding his fist onto the roll-front desk with a thud.

  “I’ve already sent a message to Mehitable,” my mother rushes to soothe him. “She says we can stay in Hudson Square as long as we like. And it’s only another week ’til the celebration. Then we’ll be out of danger.”

  “Oh, splendid,” my father says, molassesey with sarcasm. “Mehitable, no less. She’s as giddy as these dashed Luddites. Crackbrains all of them!”

  “I’ll add, Mrs. Van Sinderen, that the corporation’s investigating the threats,” the authoritative young man says. “We’ll find the culprits in ample time.”

  “And what happens then?” Mother asks.

  Papa laughs mirthlessly, joined by the other two men.

  “Ragtag and bobtails,” my father mutters. “Sons of whores. What difference does it make?”

  I catch my breath, and clap my hand over my mouth.

  The figures on the other side of the door all freeze, listening. A moment of anxious silence settles on the second floor of our town house. We all lean in, listening to each other without breathing.

  Without warning, footsteps rush across the study floor and the door flings open. I hurry to stand up and appear as though I were happening by on my way to Ed’s room, but my mother’s pinched face, pale with rage, tells me that my ruse has failed. Behind her I spy my father standing at a chaotic desk, purple-black bags under his eyes, flanked by two younger men in tight waistcoats, their hair slicked down where their high hats usually are. One of them is holding a knife. It’s the same knife I saw the stranger use to stab the note onto our front door. They all look up at me, startled into silence.