by Ben Dolnick
The Viking, Todd—who was one of those tall people who conducts his entire life stooping—wrapped his arm around me and guided me toward the window that looked out on the firewood heap. I could feel the cold coming off the glass. Todd was in his forties, with bushy eyebrows and a wide, angular, shield-shaped face. He was wearing loose corduroy pants and a gray sweater whose cuffs he kept pushing up his forearms.
“I just wanted to talk to you real quick,” he said. He was tense. He had, even when he was speaking quietly, the sort of resonant voice you can feel in your skull. By this point I’d finished my fourth or fifth cup of wine, and my stomach had started shifting. “I lost my sister when I was ten, okay?” he said. “A heart thing. So I get what you’re feeling. I know you don’t even feel like you’re really here. I get how the only real person is her. I get that.” I assumed that this was the thing he wanted to say, the thing he’d been nervous about sharing, so I made some appreciative noises, but now he looked over his shoulder and stooped even lower. “Look. Hannah didn’t die by accident, okay? And it wasn’t because she was depressed. You know that. People who live here…It’s this fucking place. She found something out. You didn’t come up here to get your sweatshirts. You want to know what she saw. Remember: buried, not burned. You’re the closest of any of us.”
Barry appeared behind us and said, over-heartily, “How are you two doing for wine?”
“We’re just fine, Captain,” Todd said, speaking in his public-consumption voice again. The rest of the Wrighters had drifted over toward me and Todd, and now they re-formed a loose circle around us. My surface temperature had dropped precipitously. Everyone seemed to be waiting for someone else to think of what to say. “Nick, where are you staying tonight?” Annie said, finally. “You aren’t driving back to the city, I hope?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I—excuse me.”
I hurried, in the way of people who have suddenly realized they might vomit, through the living room and kitchen exhibit and back into the caretaker’s apartment. The door was open after all. Our bathroom was empty now—towels gone from the hangers, Hannah’s loofah gone from the shower—and for a few minutes I stood hunched over the toilet, willing myself to retch. Todd’s words, plus some critical mass of wine, had put my entire system into a state of three-alarm emergency. My heart was racing, my legs were tingling. I felt seconds from either passing out or throwing up—they were expressions of the same impulse. But neither one happened, so I splashed my face with cold water and stood breathing heavily for a minute in the middle of the last room where Hannah and I had lived.
It really had been stripped. The room reminded me now, even more than when we’d first moved in, of a lonely and unwell man’s apartment. There was our double bed, now a bare mattress on a box spring. There was the round red and orange rug, faded and dust-fuzzed. There were our cracked-pane windows, now acting as pitch-black mirrors. I sat down in the old chair by the window—a heavy wooden chair with wonky wheels—and spun myself around so I was facing the plywood shelf above the desk. Here, slump-spined and yellow-speckled, were the half-dozen books that someone had at some point decided it was crucial for any Wright House caretaker to own. A People’s History of Hibernia. The Selected Letters of Edmund Wright. Hibernia Town Directory. The Selected Journals of Edmund Wright. Native Plants and Wildflowers of the Northeast. I don’t think I’d ever touched a single one of these books, but I’d occasionally seen one or another of them on Hannah’s bedside table.
I was in no hurry to return to the party, so I finished what was left in my cup, then pulled out The Selected Letters—an extremely self-published-looking blue-green paperback—and cracked it open to a middle page. Here was Edmund Wright in the spring of 1868, apologizing to someone for being too long out of touch. Having not written to you in some months, the task acquired perhaps exaggerated difficulty in my mind, since there had accumulated so many equally significant pieces of news that to choose among them seemed to require a prodigious act of winnowing. And here he was, twenty pages later, writing about a whiskered gentleman pausing to sneeze in the middle of the road and how the sight had reminded him of a study he’d meant to conduct about the peculiar class of bodily acts that are neither wholly voluntary nor wholly automatic.
How was it—the thought came to me as another, sharper sort of pain in my stomach—that the course of Hannah’s life, and the course of my life, had been shaped by this babbling white-bearded man? I stared at his tea-colored picture in its oval on the cover, like a photo in a locket. Deep eye wrinkles, tufty sideburns, long earlobes. I’d never really thought about Edmund Wright the person in the months when we’d been living there—he’d been half a storybook character to me, like the faces on dollar bills—but now, somehow, in the dim weird loneliness of that room, downstairs from where he and his family had slept, Wright became real to me. He’d dug crust out of the corners of his eyes, he’d looked up from his desk and wondered if he should take a walk before dinner, he’d burped and been surprised by the smell. Edmund Wright had lived, and so Hannah had died. There were more steps to it than that, I knew—including the Kemps, including me—but right then it felt as simple as a light switch: down, off.
I didn’t notice that Butch was standing in the doorway until he spoke. “Didn’t realize you were back here,” he said. “I’m supposed to be locking up. Party’s winding down.”
I nodded, stood up, slid Wright’s letters back onto the shelf.
“Have you seen Donna?” I said. For some reason my voice came out as a croak.
“What’s that, bud?”
“Do you know where Donna is? I was supposed to leave with her, get some stuff from her house.”
“Sorry,” he said, walking over to turn off the light in the bathroom. “She took off about ten minutes ago. You need a ride somewhere? She ran out of here like something was chasing her.”
. . .
I’d only ever been to Donna’s house once before—her car had died, one afternoon not long after we’d moved into the museum, and I’d still been in my good-natured rural neighbor mode then. A few miles down 82, I remembered, and then a left, or possibly a right, on…Hobb’s Lane? Bull’s Head Road? It was a one-story brick house, I knew, that she lived in with her sister, and it had a steep uneven driveway. In the dark I couldn’t read the street signs until I was almost past them. Here, lit up in my headlights like a safari animal, was a house with a yellow VW out front. Here was a house with a massive above-ground pool. Here was a stretch of dark, vine-tangled woods with a row of No Trespassing signs planted along the edge.
It took me about half an hour of meandering to finally find Donna’s street—I remembered her explaining to me that the man who lived in this log cabin on the corner had inherited a million dollars from his uncle but had decided to stay right here in Hibernia because that’s who he was. Rusty metal sunflowers stood tilting in Donna’s lawn, marking out the flagstone path leading to her front door. Her mailbox was open. Her car with its cracked windshield and bumper stickers (“HISTORIC PRESERVATIONISTS MAKE IT LAST LONGER”) was parked at an angle in the driveway. The shades in the house’s front windows were down, and, so far as I could tell, every light except for the porch light was off. It was as if she’d raced home and leapt directly under the covers.
One of the little-discussed benefits of grief—especially grief supplemented by slight drunkenness—is that it frees you up from most social norms. I walked up to the front door and pressed the doorbell a half-dozen times, listening to each ring fade inside the house. Maybe she really wasn’t home, I thought. Maybe her sister—what was her name? Celia?—had driven them to Uncle Sonny’s, where they were now polishing off a slab of chocolate cake. I pressed my forehead to the window to the right of the front door, and got a glimpse of a small dark kitchen with checked floors. I rang the bell a few more times, then walked back to the driveway and, not sure what I was expecting to see, peered into Donna’s car (a roll of paper towels, an empty Tupperware container).
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It just so happened, though, that this, standing on the right side of her car, placed me at the ideal angle—if I’d still been at the front door I would have missed it—to see a tiny gap open and close in the Venetian blinds over one of the windows on the right side of the house. Someone peeking out, shining a tiny light, and then disappearing.
I walked straight to the window—the yard sloped down on that side of the house, but I could still reach the window by standing on my toes—and I rapped my knuckles against the glass. The blinds didn’t budge, so I shouted, “Donna! It’s Nick!” (This, incidentally—hearing my own voice—was when I realized how much I must have sounded, to her neighbors, like a belligerent, drunken burglar, and how possible it was that I would at any moment be shot.) “You left without me! I need to get Hannah’s papers!”
There was still no movement inside, so I walked back around to the front of the house and up to the door. “I know you’re home!” I called, pressing the bell. “I need to get my stuff!” I was by this point alternating between bell rings and fist thumps, and I was just reaching to ring the bell for the fourth or fifth time when the door cracked open.
Donna’s sister, who I realized I’d never actually laid eyes on, appeared in the doorway—a four-inch sliver of her, anyway. She had a shriveled-apple face and she wore a green plaid robe; she looked like Donna if Donna had spent a couple of years sick in bed. Her expression was less outraged than startled. A light was on in the hall behind her. I explained to her, in my best Who was doing all that shouting? voice, who I was and what I was doing there. It was not lost on some part of me that I might not, in having forced a seventy-year-old woman to come to her door at ten o’clock at night, be entirely in the right.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Donna’s having a migraine, she came home and went straight to bed. I think it’d be better if you came back tomorrow.”
“I just need to get Hannah’s things.”
“I’m sorry, but that can’t happen tonight,” she said.
“I’m not staying in Hibernia—I need to get them now. I won’t bother Donna. Please.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice had become harder, the door gap narrower. “I’ll make sure Donna calls you when she’s feeling better.”
She moved to close the door then, and what I did in response was subtle—much subtler than she would later make it sound. What I did was I edged the front of my shoe into the crack of the door—a move honed by countless nearly missed Q trains—and slowly leveraged it open. That’s all. There was no striking, no pushing, no forced entry.
“I just want to come in for a minute,” I said, my foot still bracing the door.
“You need to get back in your car,” she said.
She was, I noticed, standing as if she had an interest not just in having the door closed but also in keeping me from seeing whatever was behind her. So I leaned around to peer past her, and before she could stop me—she shifted like a mime—I got a glimpse down the house’s carpeted central hallway, at the far end of which knelt Donna, still dressed in her sweater from the party, rummaging through a cardboard box.
This was when I actually did force my way inside, though in fairness, Donna’s sister had by this point largely stopped holding the door. I stopped at the key table; Donna looked up at me with a blank, scared expression. “How’s your migraine?” I said.
“I’m feeling better,” she said, scrambling to her feet. She stood in front of the box.
“That’s Hannah’s box.”
“I was just looking through some stuff here, and most of the papers aren’t even hers. They’re the museum’s. I can give you some of it, but it’s going to take me a while to sort out what’s what. Like I said, I can mail it down to you in the city, or you can come back sometime when—”
“Why won’t you just give it to me?”
“I just want to make sure that whatever’s in there is actually stuff that—”
“What happened to Jan Kemp?” I hadn’t known I was going to say this. The effect on Donna was as if I’d struck her between the eyes with a pebble.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I took a few steps closer. “Jan Kemp. She used to live at Wright. What happened to her?” My voice had gotten quieter. Donna’s sister had disappeared into some other part of the house.
“How the hell am I supposed to know? Go ask, you know, go ask some bozo down at Peck’s, they’ll tell you Bigfoot took her, what difference does it make?”
“Tell me what happened.”
“I wasn’t there, for Christ’s sakes,” she said. There was panic in her eyes. “Look, I’m sorry as hell for what you’re going through, but I can’t stand here in the middle of the night talking about every crazy goddamn idea in your head. You already woke up Delia, now you’re—”
“What happened to Jan Kemp?”
“Look, I don’t know how many times you want me to repeat myself, but—”
She stopped talking. Humans don’t cock their heads at weird noises the way dogs do, but right then we both did a pretty good approximation. Sirens are a rare sound in Hibernia.
I used to think of myself as preternaturally self-possessed, a man without a breaking point. I’d see people melt down after some succession of stresses—bad day at work, stalled train, lost set of keys—and I’d think, How fragile. But we’re all fragile; some of us just take slightly more shaking to break.
This is a long way of saying that I’m not proud of what I did next. I body-checked Donna a few inches to the side (she stayed on her feet but hit the wall) and I blindly grabbed a few folded pages from the top of the box. Then, while Donna shouted, “That’s a fucking assault, is what that is!,” I raced out the front door and down the driveway and leapt back in the Volvo. The sirens sounded closer, but I still couldn’t see any lights. I reversed too fast and took off, with a squeal of tires that was more of a shriek, in the opposite direction from the way I’d come. This, I thought, stuffing the pages into my jacket pocket, must be how cars end up in ditches on their backs.
I’d never driven this far on Hobb’s Lane, and for all I knew the road would dead-end, but it didn’t, it just rolled on and on past white farm fences, through tunnels of dead trees, past pitch-black houses. I saw a sliver of moon behind somebody’s barn. I thought I might have seen a coyote stepping out of a dark tangle of bushes. I was burbling, nonsense-praying to myself, speeding along the middle of the road fast enough that I didn’t have enough spare attention to check the speedometer. The shock of the siren had scared the tipsiness right out of me. Well, almost right out of me. So long as I tilted my body with each curve, I felt in pretty good control. The wheel was cold. The air blowing from the heater smelled like burning plastic. The world outside the circle of my headlights was entirely black—road, fields, sky, one undifferentiated backdrop. Silver tree trunks kept appearing, signaling where the road curved, inviting me to crash into them.
But I didn’t crash, and I didn’t see any other cars, and I couldn’t hear the siren anymore, although sometimes I thought maybe it was faintly there inside the ringing in my ears. Hannah I don’t know what I’m doing I’m making so many mistakes please help me God I’m so sorry please. I was conducting the first successful high-speed escape in history. Or maybe the police hadn’t been coming for me at all and so I was conducting a needless high-speed drive in a random direction. Now I was climbing a hill, passing a house with a twinkling lawn village of Christmas lights; now I was racing down the other side of the hill, through blackness so total I held my breath. I felt like I was playing a too-hard video game, one that would send me flying off into un-drawn space at any moment. I was coming around a curve at the bottom of the hill, having the thought that maybe my entire life could be managed by imagining that it was a video game, that the obstacles were deliberate and the goals were attainable and the puzzles were solvable—when I realized that there was a spaceship immediately behind me. A blaze of red and blue lights filling all
of my mirrors. The sirens didn’t come on until a second later, for some reason, the sound dopplering up and then pouncing on me, filling my legs, my chest, my head. I pulled over by nearly crashing into a high fence. My hands were quaking against the wheel. I was breathing so hard that I thought my lungs might pop. I heard shouting and slamming doors and I saw shadows racing toward me and I knew, before Sheriff Cole’s face appeared above me, before the whole thing dissolved into noise and shoving and flashing lights, that here it was, finally—the punishment I’d been racing toward.
[Edmund Wright’s journal]
Dec. 1
…What a self-important old fool I’ve been! It was not I who was becoming more practiced at sustaining the episodes of inhabitation; it was the spirits who were becoming practiced at inhabiting me; it was they who longed to remain, gaining ever greater mastery of my mind & senses, until they could besiege me with the vision that would suit their ends.
In my student days I read of a species of caterpillar that was prone to a most frightful misfortune. This sorry caterpillar would on occasion be attacked by a small & vicious wasp who, in the course of his assault, would lay a great many eggs in the caterpillar’s abdomen. The wasp’s eggs would then proceed, by some chemical means, to control the caterpillar’s movements, inducing it to gather precisely the type of nutriment they craved. Once the eggs had matured sufficiently, they would come pouring forth from the caterpillar’s underbelly, a hellish horde…
Thus do I, at the end of my researches, having spent all the fall playing host to spirits, find myself husked & destroyed…
