by C. K. Brooke
“Remember our Christmas in Bavaria?”
I swallowed my sip. “How can I forget?” I closed my eyes, the recollection filling me. “Your grandmother’s dumplings.”
“The braised pork.” The corners of his eyes crinkled wistfully.
“Apples stuffed with pecans.”
“Walnuts,” he corrected me.
“Even better.”
“You’re starting to forget.” He pointed his fork at me. “We’ll have to go back and do it again.”
I shoveled a heap of dressing into my mouth. “Mmm. We will.”
The pine candle flickered between us. I watched the flame, my thoughts drifting. Outside, snow flurries carried on, and the occasional motor of a car hummed by.
“Ces?”
“Yeah?”
With the back of his spoon, Horst spread a fat circle of canned cranberry over his turkey. “Everything okay?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
If he had a response to this, he kept it to himself.
After dinner, we left the dishes in the sink. They could wait. The pumpkin pie was store bought, so we didn’t have to worry about preparing dessert. But that could wait, too.
We carried our wine glasses into the living room and sat together, no radio, no TV, just my legs crossed over his, and my head on his shoulder. We paged through a holiday gift basket catalog, and then through a travel magazine, Horst cracking jokes at every page. By the time we’d gone through all the cards and packages we’d received, his glass was empty.
“You haven’t had enough,” he told me, indicating my full one. “You sure you’re okay? You seem a little…preoccupied.”
I sighed against his shoulder, and the words were out before I could ebb them. “Someone committed suicide in our house.”
We were silent for a minute. Horst appeared to be taking it in strides. “How do you know?” he finally asked.
“Howard told me.” I lifted my head from his shoulder, and found his eyes. “It was his wife.”
His arm tightened around me. “Jesus,” he muttered. It sounded more like a prayer than a curse.
I laid my head down again, this time on his chest. “I wonder why he’s stayed on this street for so long. Wouldn’t he just want to get away from the bad memories? Every time he sees our house, it must kill him inside, you know?”
“Maybe he feels like he can’t leave her behind.” I listened to the comforting thud of his heartbeat under my ear as he draped a massive hand over my head and down the length of my hair. “I can’t imagine something like that,” he grunted. “I just can’t.”
“Not even nine o’clock,” I remarked, pointing to the empty bottle, “and all the Grauburgunder’s gone.”
“Stop worrying!” Horst waved a hand, and almost knocked it into the lampshade. “We’ll toast with champagne at midnight.”
Unexpectedly, the doorbell rang.
“Who could that be?” I wondered.
He adjusted, making to stand. “I’ll get it.”
I chuckled, pushing him back down. “I don’t think you’re suitable for company.”
“Why not?”
“See this?” I nudged the empty bottle on the end table. “I didn’t drink any of this.”
“It was already open.”
“Was not!” I laughed, and rounded the corner into the hallway. The bells on the wreath jangled as I opened the front door.
Howard Byrne stood on the stoop, alone, bearing a basket of schnapps. He smiled upon seeing me. “Just thought I’d stop by and wish you a Happy New Year.” He offered the basket.
“Oh.” I blinked. “That’s so kind of you.”
“Happy New Year,” boomed Horst, making his way over. I took a step back, praying he wouldn’t do anything embarrassing. “Oh, look.” He didn’t hesitate to take the basket. “He’s brought us spirits!” With his free hand, Horst pulled the door open wider. “Well, come on in, Harold, no need to freeze your ass off out there.”
“It’s Howard,” I hissed. I cast a glance of wordless apology to our neighbor.
Howard deliberated. And then, to my surprise, he stepped inside. Pity wrenched my heart at the guarded look on his face as he gazed between the wood paneled walls. I regretted whatever pain being back in the house might’ve inflicted upon him, and silently swore I would have a word with Horst as soon as he was gone. How could he have so easily forgotten what this place meant to Howard?
My husband carried the spirits into the kitchen, singing Nehmt Abschied Brüder, and I covered my face in my hands. “Howard, I’m so sorry.”
“What’s he singing?” An amused grin perked over his beard.
“It’s Auld Lang Syne in German.” I sighed. “He grew up spending the holidays in Germany, getting hammered with his grand-uncles.”
“It’s nice to see your husband in good humor.”
I tilted my head from side to side, as though weighing the statement. “Nice, maybe. Obnoxious, definitely.”
We heard the clink of glass and a grunt of, “Prost,” from the kitchen, and I groaned. “Horst, you aren’t drinking that schnapps already, are you?” I called.
Howard lowered his voice, reaching for my shoulder. “Let him indulge. I was actually wondering if I might speak with you.”
“Uh…” My skin tingled strangely under his touch. He still hadn’t released my shoulder. “Sure.”
He let go, and I took an involuntary step back. I couldn’t name why, but I’d begun to feel uncomfortable, even in my own home, with my husband just behind us in the next room.
“The girl your husband saw, the drowned one,” Howard’s voice emerged strained, “it was my daughter, Cora.”
I rubbed my chest, for it suddenly felt bindingly tight. I’d thought he’d said his wife killed herself here…did he mean to say his daughter had died here as well, in two separate, horrific incidents?
It was as though he’d read my mind. “Yes, I lost my daughter here, too, in the fishpond. She was six. But you know as well as I, that pond is far too shallow to drown in accidentally.”
My stomach lurched. “You believe someone drowned her?” I breathed.
“I know someone drowned her.”
At his grave expression, I understood who that someone was.
“Is that what you came here to tell me?” I whispered. “That your wife murdered your daughter in this house, then killed herself?”
“In part.”
I swallowed. “Your wife was Sharon?”
His eyes glistened and he looked away, but not before I was struck with a vivid vision. It flashed before me, emblazoned in my mind’s eye: the image of a beautiful, black-haired woman with tears staining her face and blood streaming down her wrists.
I inhaled, gripping the bannister of the stairwell for support. As quickly as the vision had occurred, it was gone, leaving me with a sharp pain in my head. But it was nothing to match the vast void of hopelessness that blanketed me. Sharon Byrne’s despair became my own, lingering everyplace around me, burrowing into every crevice of my mind.
“It was my fault,” lamented Howard. “All of it.”
I winced, massaging my forehead, “I’m sure it wasn’t your—”
“I was a lousy husband. As lousy as they come. I left her, pregnant and alone, for war. And while I was gone, I was unfaithful, and she knew it. Somehow, she always knew.”
This was too much information. Personal information. But the man was grieving, and it was the least I could do to let him process it, to be there for him while he did.
“But when I came home, and met my child for the first time… Well. The whole world changed. I realized I had to become a different man. And yet…” He reached to adjust a wayward frond on the Christmas wreath over the door. “My wife was ill. Very ill. And I was a fool who couldn’t see it, who ignored all the signs, until it was much too late.” His tone was level, controlled. But his eyes mourned.
“You must understand,” he said, almost pleadingly, “back then, w
e didn’t have the kinds of resources available today. Society didn’t know how to handle people like her. Neither did I. I left her to deal with it all on her own, expecting her to pull herself up and get on with things.”
Back then? I wanted to say. Help for mental health had existed for decades. Had he never seen a Zoloft commercial, or those PSAs in magazines for clinical Depression? Was he really trying to pin his neglect of his mentally ill spouse on society?
“Meanwhile,” he continued, his tone softening, “I adored our child profoundly. I showed none of that same care to my wife. Until one day, she…put an end to our little girl,” his voice hitched, “whether out of jealousy, or simply delirium, I’ll never know.”
‘I’m sorry’ seemed like the weakest condolence to offer, so I kept my mouth shut. I couldn’t fathom his suffering. All I could do was listen.
“Cecily, I came to tell you the truth. Sharon has been gone from this place a long time. She isn’t the one who haunts it.”
Confused, I thought of Cora. How could an innocent child, living or dead, be responsible for the strange activity around my house, for all of the nightmares, and for the darkness that suffocated the property? I shook my head. “Then who is?”
He surveyed me carefully. “There’s more to my story.”
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hear it, but it appeared I would have no choice. Slowly, I took a seat on the bottom stair. I was beginning to feel as though a mild breeze might topple me over.
“After she took her own life, I never saw any sign of Sharon again. But Cora’s spirit stayed.” He glanced around, as though the little girl might be hiding just behind the corner. “I could hear her laughter, her cheerful footfalls pattering up the stairs. Some days, I’d catch glimpses of her playing outside. Every time I looked again, she was gone. But those figments—those flashes of joy and hope—to be near her, to see her smile once more, even at a distance…that’s why I never left Deepwood.
“Of course, I could tell no one, lest they’d think me mad. And maybe I was, Cecily. All I knew was that those fleeting figments of her were not enough. I needed to be with her. And so, about a year later, I took my rifle into the shed, and…that was that.”
A chill coursed through my body that had nothing to do with winter. “What do you mean, ‘that was that’?”
Howard reached into his trouser pocket and extracted a worn piece of paper. Gently, he unfolded it. “I carry this,” he handed it to me, his face somber, “to remember.”
I took it in my outstretched hand. It was brittle and browned, but still identifiable as an old newspaper clipping. The date read August 13, 1959. I studied the black-and-white photograph of a soldier I almost didn’t recognize…until I saw the deep, soulful eyes. Howard Byrne, the header read. Beneath that: 1926 – 1959.
I cleared my throat. “Is this your father?”
He didn’t answer. I looked back down and skimmed the obituary. My eyes scanned over the words Korean War veteran and preceded in death by his wife, Sharon (DuLonge) Byrne and daughter, Cora.
Something in my stomach turned sour. I got to my feet, the obituary dampening in my sweating hand.
“I’m sorry.” He met my eyes. “I’m the one who weeps in Cora’s bedroom at night. I’m the one who infiltrates your dreams, locks your doors, touches your possessions. It was never personal. I just wanted you and your husband out. I’ve wanted everyone out.”
The room was spinning. I tried to recall what I’d had to drink that evening, but I knew I was sober. I’d been saving the champagne for midnight.
I heard Horst moving about in the kitchen, snacking on hors d’oeuvres I’d prepared, none the wiser to the fact that the world was tilting sideways where I stood as I stared at Howard, struggling to determine what—how—to believe.
I grabbed his wrist. He didn’t flinch. “You’re solid as stone.” I lowered my voice. “I can see you. Horst can see you. How can you claim to be dead?”
He shut his eyes. In that moment, a series of images rolled over me like a wave. A little dark-haired girl, hopping through the yard in an old-fashioned frock. Sharon’s wan face, staring through a window, hooded eyes vacant. A rifle…the shed door creaking open on a barren autumn day, the burst of a gunshot…
I covered my ears. “Stop!”
Howard reopened his eyes.
“Why?” My heart was thumping in my throat. “Why do you want us out?”
“When I ended my life,” sorrow seeped from his voice, and my heart gave a flounce at its cavernous depth, “I bound myself here, to be with Cora. Alas, she couldn’t see me. I could see her, have been watching her every day. But the purity of her spirit acted as a shield against me. The nature of my actions rendered me invisible to an innocent child like her.”
I backed up as he advanced. He didn’t seem to notice my distress.
“Her life was thwarted too young. The beings here, who sometimes communicate with me, informed me that she would be granted a second chance whenever she chose. I couldn’t bear the thought of my child returning in a new body, as a new person, leaving the daughter I loved to the dead and buried past.”
“That’s selfish,” I whispered.
“I know. But I want only to protect her. And I can’t now. I’m just an earthbound spirit, and she is forming elsewhere as we speak, in a new life, new flesh.”
“How do you know?”
“I was always able to see her…” he regarded me oddly, “until the solstice.”
The solstice. That was the day when Horst had had his vision of Cora’s death.
After that, we’d begun to share a bed again.
“Now it makes sense,” breathed Howard, advancing still, “why, over the past ten days, every time I tried to think of her, I’d only see you. She is with you, Cecily. She’s chosen you for her new beginning.”
My breaths shallowed. Was he saying…?
“Congratulations.” The words were emotionless. “I’m glad for your news. But know,” his skin suddenly flickered like a light, “I’m not going away.”
“You need to let go,” I begged him.
“Oh, no. I made a vow to protect her. I failed to do it in life. I intend to uphold it in death.”
“This isn’t natural,” I protested. “If it’s true, that I’m c-carrying Cora, then you need to move on. She clearly has.”
He only shook his head. Reflexively, I reached out to stop him from coming closer. I gasped as my hand went through his shoulder. He flickered again, the edges of his face somewhat out-of-focus.
“Go, Howard. Now. Isn’t there a light you can go to?”
“That light abandoned me ages ago.”
My chest heaved as I wracked my brain to recall the prayers of my grandfather with his rosary. “Okay, um…Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…”
He sighed.
“Our Father, who art in heaven…”
“Those don’t work on me, Cecily.” He walked straight through me, plunging me in a rush of ice cold air, then continued pacing by the stairs. “You think you’re the first to try them?”
I didn’t want this, couldn’t live this way. He’d been the culprit behind everything—the debilitating sadness, the fear, the incidents that had almost ruined my marriage. He’d fed me lies about Sharon’s spirit to appease my curiosity, and point suspicion away from himself. It should’ve occurred to me weeks ago to ask Howard which house was his, and what year he’d moved to Deepwood…to notice he always wore the same plaid flannel shirt…
He couldn’t stay. This was my house, my business—and now, my family. His time was over; he’d made that decision fifty years ago.
And that’s when it hit me. I looked down at the moldering old obituary in my hands. I carry this, he’d told me, to remember.
I wrenched my fists in opposite directions and tore the brittle paper down the middle.
“What are you doing?” he demanded.
I pressed the halves together and quartered them. “There’s nothing
left to remember.” I spoke through gritted teeth, ripping the quarters into eighths. “The past is dead. It may as well never have happened. So forget it. Be free of it—be free of everything.”
My pulse accelerated as though I was engaging in heavy exercise. Though I felt inexplicably winded, I continued to rip the paper to shreds. As I did, bits of Howard began to shred as well, jagged gaps of glowing light appearing where there was once a shoulder, a nose, or a calf.
“She’s going to be okay.” I gazed into his frightened face, his green eyes blazing into mine. “We’ll take care of her. We’ll give her the full, happy life you always wanted her to have.”
He managed to utter a final word, which sounded like it had traveled a great distance to reach me. “Promise?”
“I promise.”
His projection of a body disappeared. In its place, a red orb of light flew over my head and through the ceiling.
Instantly, I caught my breath. With a long, deep exhalation, I noticed the atmosphere surrounding me felt lighter, airier. Even the battery-powered candles in the front windows glowed more brightly. A density I hadn’t realized had been there was now gone entirely.
I stood there, the obituary torn up at my feet, just as Horst reappeared with three glasses of schnapps. He stopped short. “Where’d Howard go?”
Not even a trace of his firewood-and-cigar scent lingered behind. A soothing peace encased me, warming me, particularly in my belly area.
“Home,” I told him.
***
“How did you like the service, mein schatz?”
The gravel crunched beneath Varick’s tennis shoes. “It was all in German, Oma.”
Horst grinned. “No kidding.”
My father-in-law laughed, taking his wife’s arm. “One Ostern together back in the old country isn’t enough. We should make this a tradition, huh?”
As Horst unlocked the car doors, I slowed my steps to walk alongside our son. I noticed he was holding a brochure from the church. “What’ve you got there?”
He shrugged, handing it to me. “Pamphlet.”
The title read Die Engel. Beneath that, a famous painting of cherubim was reprinted. Curious, I unfolded it. The text was in German, but the prevalent artwork depicted more angels.
