The long sleeves were against the sun on the road and biting insects in the woods. Under the shirt and shorts she had on a bathing suit and, for a moment, as she slipped the top over her head and pulled it smoothly down, she let her hand rest against the satin finish on the suit. She’d have to swim to the raft to get the canoe.
The carpet was soft under her sock feet. She pressed her toes down into it, then without thinking pulled open her top drawer and swept a hand back past the silk-and-wire bras to find the paper-wrapped Meissen figurine. Her fingers closed on the newspaper, and she felt the little china doll underneath it, hard as bone. Heike pulled the package forward and curled the paper back.
The doll stared up at her, cool and vacant. Someone else’s nostalgia. The ridge of the girl’s round hat, her tapered neck, the wide sweep of her apron, held out as if mid-curtsey. She moved a thumb over the eyes.
There was a sound from out in the hall and Heike started and glanced up, tucking the figurine back into the drawer by reflex. The door stood, as it had before, just slightly ajar. But was the gap wider now than it had been? She turned so that her back pressed flat against the dresser. Worried, for a moment, that it was Eric come up the stairs from the office, peering in at her. The doll a secret thing, her own.
But the noise did not come again. She turned back and drew the shepherdess toward her for a final look. The light fell, a shift in the clouds, and the doll’s features came up sharper, shadowed. Some current of air from the open window brushing the back of her neck and catching also the bedroom door, which yawned open. The tap of the doorknob as it knocked back against the wall. A wave of nausea washed over her. Suddenly she didn’t want the thing anymore; she thought of smashing it, or jamming it somehow into a pocket and taking it back to the house, back where it came from. Her hand tightened on it.
From the first floor, she heard the clink of ice tongs against a glass, then Eric’s heavy step, pacing and stopping at the foot of the stairs. Waiting for her to come down.
She looked down at the figurine again, and pushed it to the back of the drawer.
OUTSIDE, THE SUN WAS STILL HIGH. Heike blinked hard against it after the semidarkness of the house and tied a blue kerchief behind her hair on her way up the drive. She had about an hour before Daniel woke up, maybe two in the heat. At the feeders, the little wren she’d seen earlier was now out of sight, and there was no blue jay, but a solitary crow stood guarding the fallen seed beneath the red house.
She turned onto the road: a faster route, but hot in the sun. She’d left her walking sandals in the canoe and so was wearing only espadrilles, the gravel underfoot biting through the rope soles. A car skidded by, throwing pebbles against her calves, and then a few minutes later another one slowed down behind her, pacing her for a while before the driver changed his mind and hit the gas again. Heike kept her eyes forward. Where the road curved, she turned down into the woods.
The embankment was soft and sloping, but down on the path she found the earth hard-packed, and she stamped her feet to shake off any loose soil. Where the trail met the stream, she turned east and away from the lake, retracing her own steps and wiping the damp from her forehead. A thin column of trees separated her from the water; one of these leaned out, almost perpendicular, so that on the landside its roots levered up out of the ground. She held onto the trunk and swayed out over the stream herself, to get her bearings.
It was a clear day, hot and shiny and clean-skied. At the water’s edge there were ox-eyes blooming and some swamp milkweed and those little white and yellow butterflies, what her mother had called cabbage butterflies. Ahead, the stream opened up and a weave in the trail took it farther into the woods and then back down again. She tried to imagine how you could lose track of a child for five minutes, ten minutes, enough time for her get out across the water and back again. You might not look first in the pond. You might look in the forest.
There was a game she’d played with Lena, her sister, to entertain her on the long days of walking at the end of the war. To distract them through the hard climb. A kind of scavenger hunt where each girl kept track of her own collection of animal sightings: owls and eagles, chipmunks, foxes; near the end, the very first of the early caterpillars. Deer, always deer. Lena arguing every time that she had seen it first, whatever it was, large or small, and Heike showing her how to stand still and wait for the birds to reveal themselves. Once, they heard the sound of a pig rooting and stood back to avoid a boar. Once, a lone sheep surprised them in its stillness, at the path’s edge, separated from its flock.
Sometimes she wondered if it was this game that had taken Lena, if she’d wandered off to follow the sound of some little animal. Heike liked to picture her safe, living up in the Allgäu with a shepherd and his family and braiding edelweiss into a crown for her hair, as though she had followed that lost sheep home. As though she had stayed seven years old forever.
It was quiet. The butterflies played at a black-eyed Susan near the stream bank. For a moment, she imagined Daniel lost without her and then blinked hard to chase the image away: Daniel was home safe, napping. It was only herself, Heike, out here alone.
From where she stood now, she could see the tall reeds ahead, and just beyond them, the younger bank, where the raft must be. She could imagine the tail of the canoe throbbing back and forth, caught between the current and its tether. The shortest distance between the shore and the raft wasn’t at the house. It was here, through the reeds.
Heike steadied herself on the trail. She would walk around, down farther to where the cottage was and the easy grade of shore, and swim from there regardless. She was a strong swimmer but not interested in fighting off a drake or feeling her ankles wrap in the lurid tendrils of some underwater plant, no matter how much shorter the distance.
She did not want to swim at all.
When she got down to the clearing, she took off her shoes and crossed the rough beach. The canoe was there, just as she’d left it, cherry red and lost in the sunlight, like a dog someone had forgotten tied up outside the grocery store. She stripped off her shirt and shorts and wrapped them around the shoes, using the shirt sleeves to tie it all up into a bundle, and left it on the log where she’d rested with Daniel the day before, Daniel spitting up water to catch his breath.
She would swim out to the canoe, but she would not put her head in the water.
There had been a breeze when she set out, but it was gone now, the air heavy and still enough that she checked the sky for a coming storm, but it was clear and blue and cloudless. The beach no different than when they had left it. She’d half-hoped to find some evidence of people: a forgotten picnic blanket, or the remains of a sandcastle at the pond’s edge. She stood in the sunshine but did not get closer to the water, turning instead to look back at the house.
A shadow wavered in the doorway. Heike pulled back, then caught herself. Of course. There had to be someone there, someone who would know about Tessa, who could explain the girl’s strange appearance and disappearance. She walked up over the tall grass.
The door was standing open. Not much. About a foot. She called out.
— Hallo?
There was a stillness to the place, the doorknob cool against her fingers when she touched it. She pushed the door a little farther open. She could see the dull linoleum in the entranceway, unmarked by dirt or mud that might be tracked in at this time of year. Could the open door be her fault? Maybe she hadn’t latched it securely—although she could remember pulling it closed.
But there had been some wind at night. She called again:
— Hallo?
Then:
— Tessa?
The name caught in her throat—for a moment she thought she heard something, a voice crying back, high and far away as a bell. She listened through her own silence, but the sound seemed to disappear. A new breeze, or some echoed birdcall from deep in the woods. Heike swallowed and called the girl’s name a second time, stronger.
The door wavered slightly,
or her arm did, holding it open. She looked down at the threshold and saw for the first time a thin line at the sill, a kind of joining mark, as though someone had held a match to the flooring and let a strip of it burn. The thought of a fire made her draw back, and she turned to look out at the raft, at the canoe where it waited, but just then she heard the thing again, the same call. Not a bird, but a song. Someone singing. Heike hesitated in the entryway, then stepped inside.
In the house, the sound did not echo but seemed to come from somewhere deep within. Ringing high and sweet, but too faint to make out any words. She came in a little farther, step by step. It was a tune she knew. Wasn’t it? Her own song, the nursery rhyme she’d sung to Daniel at the raft, bouncing him on her knee: Hoppe, hoppe Reiter . . .
She pulled up, suddenly afraid. The door was still open behind her. Heike scanned the room, her eyes falling on the kitchen cabinet, the empty space where the Dresden doll used to stand—the doll itself hidden away now, home in her own dresser drawer. The tune kept on, muffled and tinny. Outside, there was the rougher pitch of the wind, picking up speed through the trees, and something else, too, closer by this time: low and coarse, an animal sound. Heike looked toward the darkness at the back of the house, panicked. Something using the old cabin as its den, the door pushed open not by a hand but by a shoulder, a snout. The noise fell away, though, even as she searched for it, leaving only the same high, ringing song in its place, oddly rhythmed now, faster, off-key. There was a glint of something at the kitchen window, and Heike started and jumped back, grabbing for the door.
A wind chime. She could see it there, dull and dangling from its rope, on the other side of the dirty glass. Not a song, but the sound of the wind, a string of tin bells. The tune only in her mind. It lifted and rang again as she watched, spinning slightly on its hook. She wondered that she had not heard the chime before—but the other days there had been no breeze, the air hanging heavy around her.
Heike turned away. The place still empty as before, no voice, no girl, no Tessa at all.
She came back outside, wary, drawing the door closed behind her. The sky had darkened now in one corner, a far-off edge. She did not hear the animal sound again, but from the other side of the pond there was a low rumble, a truck moving slowly along the upper road, or else thunder. The breeze came through from one end of the beach to the other, lifting the branches as it went, the chime rising with it, and another sound, too, a steady beat. She turned: the door batted at its frame. Hadn’t she already closed it?
Something played at the back of her neck and she started, but it was only the breeze again, ruffling the knot of her kerchief. Heike pulled the door shut a second time, strong and tight.
SHE LOOPED THE BUNDLE of clothes over her head, using the tied-up sleeves as a strap, and moved out into the water with the makeshift pack resting against her shoulders. She could hear the ring of the chime in the distance, even now. She wanted noise, some kind of commotion to cover the sound of it, still mimicking a tune in her head, and she dove forward without thinking. Her arms pulling cleanly through the water. The canoe was out there: as she got closer, she could hear the dull knocking where the bow end was beating against the boards of the raft. She kept her head up until that also made her nervous and she began to dip her face on every third stroke, and then on every second, eyes wide, the pond greenish and the floor of it far down below. The bundle at her neck dragged with the weight of the water it took on and choked her. At the raft she heaved herself up, pulling the waterlogged clothes off her shoulders and throwing them against the bulkhead in the canoe. The paddle still lay there, flat against the boards, along with the pack; her towel in a rumple next to the two glass jars. She loaded all these into the boat with her wet things. She could see her sandals where she’d left them tucked under a seat.
A streak of white caught her eye from shore, and Heike stopped and stared, searching, her breathing heavy. A flash of blond hair. There: some shimmery movement. The girl, Tessa, half-hidden in the trees. Heike froze, sure of her. The child’s grey eyes shining pale and clear, unwavering. But a moment later she was gone: it was only the tall grass, swaying where the forest broke into clearing, wheat-coloured and seedy. She looked away, blinking hard. She was only spooking herself, hearing a song in the peal of cheap bells, seeing things that weren’t there. The house itself still as she’d left it.
There was a long, crackling roll in the distance: the coming weather moving toward her in a line now. She took the paddle in one hand and stepped into the canoe, staying low and working her cold fingers to untie the knot. The rope was wet. It threaded as she worked, a wiry strand pulling sharply under her fingernail and drawing blood. The high, constant ring of the chime in the wind. The light fell low all at once, and Heike checked over her shoulder to see where the clouds were and sucked on the finger. A shadow flickered in the window of the little house, the sun moving out from behind its shade and back in. She felt a wave of cold rush over her, the prick of pins across her brow, the back of her neck.
The door stood open again, as it had when she arrived.
She pushed off hard and started paddling. The pond was wide open, and the wind sent licks of water slopping up over the gunwale, the current carrying her to the narrow and downstream quickly, then out onto Cayuga. She leaned into her stroke, aiming for open water. It would be calmer and safer against the shoreline, but she didn’t want to get mired in the reeds. The light dimmed again.
The wind came across the bay in a wide sweep, hitting the canoe sharply on one side. Chop swelled up and flooded the bow deck. The rain hadn’t reached her yet, but she could see the line of it moving down the lake. The next burst of wind picked up the bow and spun the canoe on its stern end, sending her back against land. She fought hard with the paddle, cranking the canoe around and pushing back on the reeds, then stroking deeply to put some distance between herself and the bank, her shoulders aching. She got the canoe out into deep water, and a new gust of wind swept her around again.
She was losing ground. The wind was now strong enough that it seemed possible it would push her back up into the stream, against the current. A hundred yards back, almost hidden from view, she caught a glimpse of the raft, bobbing on the surface of the pond. Her grip tightened on the paddle: on shore, she could see the house with its door open, stubbornly banging against the frame, and down at the water’s edge, the girl herself, standing out in the weather. Her hair streaming, as though she had only just surfaced.
Heike thrashed at the reeds, desperate to get back out into the lake. As the canoe swung around, there was a low roll of thunder and the rain caught up to her in a sheet. Upstream, the girl seemed to lean in, moving across the water to the raft in a fluid line, then disappearing altogether in the downpour. Replaced by just the same high grass, battered in the storm. Heike pushed off the bank, her hair soaked and sticking to the back of her neck and the kerchief funnelling water down the sides of her face. There was a voice, loud over the beating of the rain, and she realized she was screaming. She was on her knees in the bottom of the canoe, hacking at the reeds with the paddle. Water sloshed up over her thighs. Heike dipped the paddle low and stroked hard to get free. There was nothing behind her except weather. She imagined being hit by lightning and Daniel left alone, and she blamed herself and kept moving forward until she found the mouth of their own stream, their own launch.
She jumped out and pulled the canoe in by hand, wading through the rocky shallows in her bare feet and dragging the boat up onto the shore instead of tying it fast. The rain slacking off now, mud flecking her legs and arms. She ran up the trail. The stream ahead grey and empty, and the woods to either side no longer lively, but wet and heavy and dark with harm.
HEIKE CAME UP THROUGH THE GARDEN and along the drive to the front steps, relieved to find everything normal, in its place. The rain had come and gone here with the same ardour, and she stopped, listening for a moment. There was a knocking at the back of the house. Repeated, but not patterned. She
put down her armful of wet clothes and walked around to the yard. The back door to the garage swayed a few inches in the last of the rain and sank softly against its frame, then swayed out again. This gave her an odd turn: she watched the heavy air drawing at it like breath, then reached out and shut the door.
She found her housecoat where she’d left it that morning in the laundry room and stripped off her wet clothes and leaned over the wide sink to wring out her hair. She straightened, pulling her fingers through the damp curls a few times, and glanced up at the clock. She’d been gone almost two hours. There was no sound of playtime from either the white room or anywhere else in the house, and Heike padded up the stairs to see if Daniel was still sleeping.
The blinds were still down, and she opened them, one after the other, to let the afternoon light into the room. She turned, expecting to see him still asleep within a mess of blanket, but he wasn’t there.
— Daniel?
She said his name softly, not wanting to bother Eric if he was working or wake him if he was asleep. The closet was standing open, but she peered inside anyway, and then under the bed, in case he’d heard her come in and decided to play hide-and-seek. Heike called out to him again, louder this time. She shook out the blanket and folded it before leaving the room, patting it down as though to make sure he was not somehow stretched and tangled inside.
She went back down the stairs and walked a fast circuit, calling louder now, but no one answered. At Eric’s office she drew herself up and took a breath before knocking.
— Eric?
She eased the door open. There was a lowball glass on the desk with a trace of water at the bottom of it, and the window was open just enough for the breeze to make a flickering noise in the blinds. No one was in the room.
— Eric! Daniel!
Heike twisted in the doorway. The car was still in the garage; she’d seen it when she went around back to shut the door before coming into the house. She ran back upstairs, frantic now, everything lying still and neat, even the towels folded and resting on the counter at the edge of the bathroom sink.
Hysteria Page 9
