The Appearance of Annie Van Sinderen

by Katherine Howe

  “United Brotherhood of . . . Huh.” I pause, thinking. Where have I heard that before? Luddites . . . Ludditz . . . the graffiti in Maddie’s squat. But something else . . .

  I rush back over to the librarian’s desk. She smiles pleasantly up at me.

  “Find something good?” she asks.

  “Maybe,” I say. “Listen, I know you’re busy and everything, but could I use your computer for, like, two seconds?”

  “Why don’t you go downstairs? Plenty of terminals there,” she points out.

  “No, I know. But my friend’s waiting for me, and I just . . . I promise, it’ll only take a second.”

  “You said two seconds. Which is it?” She arches an eyebrow at me.

  “All right,” I confess. “Two. But not a second more.”

  She gestures with her head for me to come around behind her desk. When I get there I open up her browser.

  “Google? God, you’re killing me,” she says.

  “Sorry,” I mutter.

  I search “United Brotherhood of Luddites.”

  In the pages and pages of random stuff, most of it irrelevant, I spot one thing that chills me so deeply my fingers practically go numb.

  It’s a nineteenth-century engraving. A trademark, maybe, or like something you’d see on a letterhead.

  The engraving is of a spindle.

  Just like the one on the sealing wax.

  “That’s it!” I exclaim, looking excitedly at the librarian.

  “What’s it?” she asks me, clearly amused at my excitement.

  “They’re going to blow up her parents! On the barge!” I almost shout. “I have to tell her! Tyler!” I holler across the reading room at my friend, who glances up from my camera.

  “What?” he calls.

  “Let’s go!” I’m gathering all the newspaper printouts in my arms and dropping them everywhere instead. “Can I print this out real quick?”

  “Sure,” the librarian says, voice mild with amusement. She clicks the mouse and the printer spits out a poorly scaled, fat-pixelled image of the spindle engraving. It’s from some outdated blog about the history of anarchism in Britain and the United States.

  While I’m doing that, Tyler’s come over and is looking curiously at me.

  “All right, there you have it.” The librarian grins. “Good luck.”

  “Thanks!” I say, stuffing the image of the spindle engraving into the sheaf of papers under my arm and steering Tyler away with me.

  I’m preoccupied as we scurry to the elevator. I have to tell Annie not to get on the barge. Anarchists are going to blow it up and kill her parents. I have to figure out how to find her again, but how?

  “Wes?” Tyler interrupts my train of thought.

  “What?” I say, irritated.

  He looks surprised and hurt, like he’s not used to being the one to follow along behind me, rather than vice versa.

  “Just,” he says, “I was looking at your camera. There’s nothing wrong with your focus. It works totally fine. It holds the settings and everything.”

  “Are you sure?” I say, surprised.

  “Positive.” He gives me a long, strange look.

  The elevator dings open, startling us both. We step in and punch the button for the main floor. There’s no one else in the elevator, and we both stare up at the floor numbers lighting up one at a time over our heads.

  “I watched some of your footage, while I was waiting,” Tyler says, without looking at me.

  “Yeah?” I say, glancing at him sidelong.

  He laughs once, through his nose. “Yeah,” he says.

  The elevator arrives at the ground floor and whooshes open.

  “Typical,” Tyler says before we step out.

  “What’s typical?” I ask.

  “You, you jerk,” he says with a lopsided smile. “Leave it to the documentary guy to film a truly transcendent state. I should’ve known.”

  I eye him to see if he’s angry, or teasing me, but I can tell that he’s not. I think he’s just begrudgingly impressed.

  “Well,” I point out. “She showed up for you first.”

  He nods, unconvinced. “Shuttered Eyes,” he agrees. “Yeah, well, whatever. But if you’ll notice, each time, she was really there looking for you.”

  My cheeks flush. I don’t know what to say to this. All I know is that if I don’t see her again, I’m going to . . . I’m going to . . .

  I cannot accept the idea that I might not see her again.

  “I can’t believe it,” Tyler continues. “All the time, I thought it would be the people there who’d be the most interesting for my film. I never once thought of catching a real—”

  “Don’t say it,” I cut him off.

  “Don’t say it? Why not?” he asks.

  “Just don’t. It really bothers her.”

  He laughs, tossing his head back.

  “It bothers her! Oh, man.” Tyler is marveling at my weirdness, I can tell.

  “What?” I say. “It does. She’s very sensitive about it. Wouldn’t you be?” I ask him as we weave our way toward the security desk.

  “I guess I would,” he admits.

  We open our bags for inspection, and the guard pages through my Xeroxes to make sure I don’t have any stolen copies of the Bill of Rights tucked in there or whatever, and then we’re outside in the summer afternoon sunshine.

  “If I help you find her, will you tell me how you figured out what she really was?” Tyler asks me quietly. “Will you let me talk to her?”

  “Um,” I demur.

  It’s not that I don’t want him to meet Annie, it’s just that I’m not sure it’ll work. Will he be able to see her? Other than on film, I mean. Or through a mirror.

  While I’m waiting for a response to come out of my mouth, my cell phone vibrates in my cargo shorts pocket with a text message received. I pull it out and squint at the screen in the glare of the sunshine.

  Maddie.

  She wants to know what we’re doing tonight.

  A knot of guilt ties itself in my stomach. It’s a pretty unfamiliar feeling, too, given that for most of high school girls didn’t seem to know I existed. I was always the guy that girls would take to dances as friends when the guy they were really interested in was going with someone else. If my high school girlfriend knew I was now juggling two girls at once she’d laugh so hard she’d probably get a nosebleed. I text back with my left hand that I can meet her at the same bar we went to before if she wants.

  When? She wants to know.

  I chew my lip, and then suggest seven. Tyler’s looking over my shoulder, but in the glare I don’t think he can see what I’m doing.

  “Well?” he prods me.

  I shove the phone back in my pocket and smile.

  “All right,” I say. “Sure. Come on.”

  I stride away from the library, turning right and heading downtown, away from Washington Square.

  “Where’re we going?” Tyler asks as he trots alongside me.

  “I think,” I say, “that she’s able to find me, no matter where I am. She showed up in my room late last night, but I’d never told her where I was staying.”

  “She did? Wow. Did you freak?” Tyler asks with a grin. “Was it like that scene in that movie, where the woman’s floating over the guy with her hair streaming behind her and then she goes invisible and then his belt starts undoing itself and his eyes roll up in the back of his head?”

  “God! No! Shut up!” I smack him on the arm, laughing. “Jeez.”

  Tyler laughs.

  “But that’s me assuming she has control over where she goes,” I say. “Right? And we don’t know for sure that she does. So let’s say she doesn’t. She wouldn’t just show up somewhere random, would she? No. She’d show up where she’s comfortab
le.”

  Tyler’s nodding along with my logic, his hands shoved in the pockets of his skinny black jeans. “So. Where’s she most comfortable?” he asks.

  We’re making good time now, and we jog across Broadway to Great Jones Street, heading for the Bowery. I look at Tyler, somehow completely certain that I’m right.

  And I say, “She’d go home.”

  CHAPTER 8

  I am laughing so hard I almost can’t catch my breath. My whole body is shaking with it, and I’m starting to get a stitch in my side. Oh, it’s perfect! I can’t believe I didn’t figure it out sooner. How can I have been so stupid?

  My father looks down on me, his sallow face twisted.

  “Annatje, get ahold of yourself,” he says, eyes shifting left and right as though afraid someone’s going to burst in on us and accuse him of something.

  “What for?” I cry, laughing so hard that tears are squeezing out of my eyes and rolling down my cheeks. “Are you afraid, Papa?”

  “What! No!” he raises his voice and grabs hold of my upper arm as though to shake me back to my senses. The beggar woman outside the drawing room window shades her eyes with her hands to peer in at the commotion.

  The laughter rises in my chest until I’m screeching, hyena-like, at the peeling plaster rosettes that decorate Aunt Mehitable’s drawing room ceiling.

  “Stop it!” he shouts, rattling me back and forth. “Stop it this instant!”

  I swallow my guffaws and smile prettily up at him. “They were right, about you,” I tell him.

  The drawing room door flies open and we’re met with the shocked face of my aunt. Her eyes jump between my father and me, and quickly land on the woman spying in on us through the window.

  “What’s all this, then?” she asks. “Mr. Van Sinderen? Is everything all right?”

  My father releases my upper arm, and I stagger sideways with the force of it, reaching up to rub the bruise that’s been pressed into the flesh under my nightgown sleeve. My aunt hurries to the window and slaps the curtains closed. She folds her arms and stares accusingly at us.

  “Yes. Thank you, Mehitable.” Papa always calls my aunt by her first name, because he knows she hates it.

  “Annatje. Come. I’ve got that tea you asked for.” She gives me a pointed look.

  Still hiccupping with my hysterical laughter, I manage to say, “Thank you, Aunt.”

  She moves over and positions me somewhat behind her, steering me to the door with her body between me and my father. I glare at him over her protecting shoulder.

  He stands uncertainly, flexing the fingers of his right hand.

  “You’ll have her ready to join us on the dais, I trust,” he says to my aunt.

  “Indeed. It’s quite a day, today. One we won’t soon forget,” my aunt says before shutting the door on him with finality.

  When we’re alone in the dark front hallway, my aunt peers into my face.

  “What’s wrong? You can tell me, you know,” she whispers. She tucks my puff of curls behind my ear with her fingers and plucks here and there at my nightgown with concern.

  “Auntie,” I say, searching into her face. “Was Mother always this way?”

  My aunt glances with alarm up the narrow staircase, I suppose seeing if we’re being observed. Then she sighs.

  “She was, in fact,” Mehitable says. “Eleanor’s an ambitious woman. Always was. Why do you think she came down to New-York? You think she’d have been happy as a Connecticut farmwife? Chapped hands? A dozen children underfoot? Up before the dawn? Can you see Eleanor content with morning milking, and nothing more elegant than summers of church picnics and winter sleighing parties? Come now. You know her better than that.”

  It’s true. I do know her better than that.

  “And why did you come?” I ask, drawing my shawl over my shoulders. My aunt always did like a good sleighing party. And I did, too.

  My aunt looks up at the ceiling for a long minute, and shrugs. “She brought me down with her. As a chaperone, you know. When we were girls, after your grandparents died. You don’t get to meet the likes of the Van Sinderens without you have a chaperone to come along. Else, they’re liable to think . . .”

  She trails off, and then gives me a wan smile.

  “Well. In any case. You’ll be married yourself, soon enough. And just think of the prospects you’ll have, if her plans all come together. Mind you wear that dress we laid out for you today. How lovely you’ll look. Why, we’ll have you married off before Lent.”

  She gives my cheek an affectionate pinch, but can’t stop herself from glancing worriedly at the door that hides my father.

  “All right,” I say, feigning acquiescence. “I will.”

  “That’s my girl,” she says. “Now, shoo.” She flaps the backs of her hands at me to scatter me back up the stairs where I belong.

  I slowly haul myself up the staircase. But I won’t be going to my room. I know exactly where I’m going to go. I’ve finally figured it out.

  It occurs to me that if my guess is correct, I might not see my aunt Mehitable again. I pause, my hand clutching the banister, and gaze down the stairs at her compact Yankee form, in its many-times-repurposed mantua and practical cap. She’s staring at the drawing-room door with a worried look on her face.

  I stare at her. I want to tell her how much I love her. How much I loved visiting her funny little house, when I was small. How much I’ll miss her.

  But when I try to form the words, a hot lump stops in my throat, and all I can do is smile at her. As if sensing that there is something that I want to say, my aging little aunt glances up at me and gives me a bright smile.

  “You go on, now,” she insists. “Stop dillydallying. It’s time to get ready. Past time.”

  We look, smiling, on each other for a long minute.

  “Yes,” I say finally. “I know.”

  • • •

  When I reach the landing outside my bedroom door, I huddle into a dark corner. I can hear Beattie in one of the bedrooms, humming. Ed’s out running wild with some of the neighborhood boys. Mother’s upstairs writing letters, Papa is locked in the drawing room.

  I’m alone.

  I retreat into the shadows, concealing myself behind a disused hall stand, my shawl tight over my shoulders. I flatten into the wall as if I could disappear into the burls of the woodwork.

  I close my eyes, and behind my eyelids I conjure a picture of the old-fashioned spindle that I saw stamped into the sealing wax on the letter Wes found in the library. I hold the image perfectly in my mind’s eye, as though I were looking at the letter again in my hands, examining every tiny detail.

  And then I think about Herschel. I think about his soft brown eyes, with black lashes heavy like silk fringe. I think about the way that his eyes shine when he looks at me. I imagine that I can feel the cameo on my finger. As these thoughts pass through my mind, a cool breath of air brushes over my cheeks, and the curls over my ears stir in its eddies.

  Yes. I focus more closely. The grooves of the wax, stamped into the shape of a spindle. A spindle like the ones the English Luddites smashed ten years ago.

  Luddites.

  A secret society of anarchists.

  They’re right. They’re right, about my father. My father the slavemonger, building an empire on the backs of people he pretends to want to free. He’s a liar. The Luddites know that the canal will line the pockets of the rich and hurt people it pretends to help. Even people far away from New-York. The future will grind them up like grist in the mill.

  But I don’t know what the Luddites are planning at the Grand Aquatic Display.

  I have to talk to them.

  My eyes still closed, I stretch a hand forward, groping to where I would expect to find the hall stand.

  My hand touches nothing.

  A huge smile bre
aks across my face.

  Eyes squinted shut, I take one step forward, away from the wall, and stretch out both arms on either side of myself. I stand, poised over an abyss, touching nothing, my head thrown back, feeling the air move about my body, my fingers stretching as if they could reach into the void.

  I draw the deepest of breaths, hovering, and then I let myself fall backward. But instead of falling against the wall, or tumbling over the railing and plunging down the stairwell of my aunt’s house, I sink into a soft cloud of nothing. I float, arms and legs splayed, nightdress billowing around my ankles. My shawl unwinds from me and slips away. I’m floating, drifting like a leaf in some in-between space. But it’s a soft drifting, comfortable. I can swim into different orientations, drawing my knees up to my chest and then coiling around to drift on my belly, my curls hanging down over my ears. I reach my arms forward, as I used to do when breast-stroking in the Hudson with Herschel, but this time there’s no weightiness of water in my clothes dragging me down.

  I can move.

  My guess was right.

  I’ve figured out how to get where I need to go.

  Now, I have to find out what happened on that barge.

  CHAPTER 9

  We stop short on the stoop outside the no-name pizzeria, and Tyler looks at me with surprise. Its windows are open to catch any passing breeze, not that there is any to catch. A couple of kids, their mouths full of cheesy pizza deliciousness, pause their chewing long enough to stare at us. The pizza of curiosity.

  “What’re we doing here?” he asks.

  “This was her house,” I explain. “That’s why she showed up here first. She lived here.”

  “Get out,” he says, staring up at the redbrick town house. “For real?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “The whole thing was her house? You’re kidding.”

  “Well, there weren’t as many people here then. They probably had more room,” I say.

  “Don’t kid yourself,” Tyler says with a roll of his eyes.

  “What do you mean? There weren’t. The city basically stopped at Washington Square. She told me,” I insist.

  “Yeah,” he says. “But do you have any idea how many people had to live all crammed together back then? You have no idea. My dad says when he was growing up in Chinatown, there were still tenements with, like, two whole families sharing two rooms, and a bathroom in the hall. And that was in the fifties. In the nineteenth century, forget it. It was disgusting.”