Hysteria

by Elisabeth de Mariaffi

  — Here we are, she said. Here is me and here is Daniel. Here is the cabin. And here, in the pond, there is a raft, see? We sit on the raft like this, and suddenly there is a girl in the water. She sketched out the scene quickly: Daniel’s interaction with the girl, the clapping game, the way the girl dove down and vanished. Heike’s attempt to rescue her, and Daniel’s own near drowning.

  — This is the cabin you tried to show me.

  — There was nobody there, Leo. No family. No mother, no father looking for her. Nobody in the woods.

  — And in the house?

  — Nobody.

  — You went in?

  — No. Not together. I couldn’t take him in, she said. Daniel. I had a bad feeling, so we stayed outside.

  She described the doorway, wildflowers strong and bright and tall, aside from the few crushed by her own footfall on her earlier visit, and the thin burn mark, a fire line, across the threshold.

  — I pushed the door open and called out, she said. But there was no one. And then this, look at this. She still had the pencil in her hand, and it seesawed back and forth between her fingers as over a fulcrum. She tapped the page. A day later Eric took us to the Willard. Daniel was talking and playing in the bushes, just the same, a clapping game. Only this time no one else was there. He was playing by himself. Like this: Heike dropped the pencil in order to clap her palms together and then slapped them lightly against Dolan’s chest. She pulled back and held the hands out to him, fingers wide.

  — When he stopped, his hands were all bloody from the thorns. It was the same game he played with the little girl on the raft, but this time he was alone. She looked up at Dolan. It scared me, she said. But now . . . now I feel like it was an omen. It was a sign.

  — This is a real thing?

  — Yes, of course it’s real. I’m telling you it’s real. Only a few days after that, he was gone.

  Dolan took her hands and folded them together.

  — But Heike, we know where Daniel is.

  — I don’t know.

  — Of course you know. He’s with Eric. He’s got to be. Didn’t you tell me that yourself?

  — How can you be so sure? She pulled back, wrenching her hands away. He’s gone. He’s missing, she said. Disappeared. Just like that little girl, just like Tessa.

  — And just like your sister.

  She didn’t answer, and Dolan closed his mouth and looked over what she’d drawn out, her own rough panels. Heike laid a hand on the page, as though he’d been trying to take it from her.

  — You think I’m being foolish.

  — You don’t need a detective, Heike. Your son is with your husband. He leaned in as he said it, catching her eye and holding it. What you need is a damn good lawyer.

  Heike took her hand off the desk, lightly, and shook out her cuffs so that her wrists disappeared into the sleeves, just the fingertips showing. It was hard to keep her breath even. She had the urge to run and keep running as long as her legs would hold her up.

  She looked around the room, the muscles in her neck and shoulders taut.

  — You told me you wanted a ghost story, she said. So. Now you have one.

  He took the pencil from her and began to doodle a border around the edge of the page. She watched him for a moment, his smooth lines curling in and out of each other. He was either trying to stay calm himself or trying to distract her. He lifted the pencil, thoughtful.

  — What does this have to do with Miss Healey?

  — Who?

  His own page, the one Heike had been looking at when she’d called him over, lay to one side of the table. He pushed it toward her.

  — This, Dolan said, stubbing at it with two fingers. It must have linked up in your mind somehow. What’s the connection?

  Heike fingered the edge of the page.

  — Because I saw your little girl, your ghost girl, and it reminded me so much of Tessa. That’s what Dani called her. Tessa.

  Dolan’s drawing of the girl with her teddy bear seemed sharper now. She fought an urge to lay her hand over the image, to cover her up. She brought the hand up to her eyes instead and gave her temples a rub.

  — Or I think so, she said. It all seems crazy now. Crazy and very far away.

  Dolan kept his attention down on the page, but his face lightened.

  — So that’s why you thought I’d written Tessa. Instead of Lisa. You’re right, that would be creepy. But no such luck. Truth is, I don’t believe in omens.

  He went back to his drawing a second or two longer, then set the pencil down and caught her eye again. The light in the room had changed a bit; he looked older.

  — I can tell you right now, he said. You have nothing to worry about. If you saw a little girl, she was probably from around there. There are rich kids and poor kids in your neck of the woods, and the poor kids are good swimmers because their parents just let them roam around outside. That kid was probably halfway home by the time you ever dove after her.

  Heike stayed where she was but leaned toward him.

  — I think about her all the time.

  — You’re a mother. You can’t help yourself.

  She looked down at her own page, the raft and the children drawn simply, a few gestural pencil lines. Dolan sketched something else in now, another figure.

  — Your Dresden doll. He gave the figure a few punctuating taps with the tip of his pencil. Now, see, for the TV show, that’s what would be causing all the distress.

  — The figurine?

  — There’s the money. The doll is haunted. Not the little girl.

  Heike looked away to the window and then back again.

  — And she has a voice, this doll. Don’t you think? A voice that seems to come out of nowhere.

  — You’re a natural. I knew it as soon as you started telling me your raven story. We’ll call it “Living Doll.”

  Heike folded the page sharply in half, and then in half again, the drawings now hidden away inside the crease lines.

  — I’m not making up stories, Leo. I’m telling you. I heard a voice. Last night, just before I left the house for good. Just after I found the doll. She pushed up on her tiptoes, holding his shoulder for balance. Right in my ear, she said. Like this.

  — An animal. Or trees creaking. Or nothing. You were half out of your wits.

  — I was full wits. It wasn’t a tree or the wind or anything else you can think of. I heard it, just as I hear you now. Just as you hear me. A child’s voice. A girl.

  He hesitated.

  — You’ve been through a hell of a week.

  But she didn’t let go of his shoulder, and he stooped a little and his ear came closer.

  — I remember you. That’s what she said. I remember you.

  — Who said? Dolan straightened himself a little. Heike came down off her toes, her hip striking the edge of the table. The impact jarred the two pages, Dolan’s and hers, and they shifted downward, one sliding into the other as a hand might go into a pocket.

  Heike rubbed at her hip.

  — Tessa, she said.

  14.

  In the evening they sat out on the back veranda, looking down the long lawn where the clambake had been a few nights before. There were still divots in the grass, Dolan said, from the card tables. Their sharp-turned legs. The table was set for dinner, and Heike played with the flat of her knife, pressing her thumb into it and then watching as the print faded and disappeared. The sun was low, and it caught in the glass of the greenhouse and glinted there like odd shards, sharp against the eye, flame orange. There were still a few more weeks of true summer; the light had not yet begun to thin. Dusk settled in, and the garden went a little bit blue. Dolan had a rolling cart pushed up next to the rail and he made Manhattans, dropping in sour cherries from a glass jar. Imported: his friend Azzopardi had brought them back from France.

  Heike could see the willows on the other side of the yard reflected in the greenhouse panes, the draping branches distorted by the light. Their
movement almost animal-like, undulating in a way that suggested meditation, not weather. The glass itself was liquid and lawn green, and grew darker as the sun slipped off. Heike was still wearing Dolan’s sawed-off trousers. Her feet were bare. The housekeeper served the soup, the toe of her shoe needling up against Heike’s ankle bone. Heike flinched in alarm. A little electroshock.

  — Sorry, she managed, although as she said it she knew it was not her fault, and in fact she was the guest. I’m sorry.

  The housekeeper squinted at her as though she was not familiar with the word and tipped the ladle into Dolan’s bowl.

  — Sorrel, ma’am. Sorrel. That’s why it’s so green.

  She was an older woman and well used to Dolan’s bachelor proclivities. She’d worked for him a long time. Heike wanted to thank her but trailed off, and the woman disappeared into the house, smoothing her apron once her back was turned. The soup was left in a red ceramic tureen between them, Heike and Dolan. The ladle had its own plate.

  — I don’t know her name, she said.

  — What’s that? Oh, you mean Susan. There was a bit of cress floating in the soup as a garnish, and Dolan pinched it up between his thumb and forefinger. Mrs. Hammond, he said. You should call her that: the Mrs. name. She’s fussy at times, with, you know. He flicked the cress over the railing into the garden below. Well, he said. She will be fussy with you.

  — With your ladies? Heike leaned forward, filling her spoon and then tipping it so the soup ran out in a thin stream, rippling into a circle within the larger circle of the bowl. She was cooling it down. Tell me, she said. Do you always chop off the legs of your pants for a new lady friend?

  Dolan was eating. Next to the tureen was a little dish of oyster crackers, and he tossed a few of these into his bowl the way you’d shoot dice.

  — Most of my lady friends manage to hold on to their dresses, he said.

  He’d pegged her storyboard, the sketches of Tessa and Daniel, to the line in his office as though it were one of his own, Heike’s ghost story falling between a man condemned to prison on a far-off planet and an aging movie star desperate to disappear into the screen and escape her own redundancy. When she’d pressed him again about the story, though, he’d only brushed her hair back away from her face and taken her jaw in his hands.

  — You’re anxious. You want to find your boy. Of course you do.

  — But we don’t know, we don’t, that Eric has him. I don’t know.

  — I think we know that.

  The Dresden figurine stood on the table now, with the soup and the crackers. Heike reached out and touched it from time to time, laying it flat, then standing it up again. Some other position always felt safest. Inside the house the phone rang, a jarring sound. The housekeeper did not pick it up straight away, and Heike looked at Dolan, alarmed, and dropped the spoon in her hand.

  — He doesn’t know you’re here, Dolan said.

  — It’s only a matter of time.

  The ringing stopped and she waited, her eyes on the house, to see if Mrs. Hammond would arrive with a message.

  — Tell me again, Dolan said. How you managed to wind up with him in the first place. He was eating in a brusque way, but did not slurp.

  — Eric? Heike tipped up her bowl a little, trying to distract herself. I met him in Switzerland. I don’t know. 1950, I’d say? We came to America in 1951. He has the paperwork somewhere.

  It occurred to her that the empty file drawers she’d seen in his office meant that this paperwork must now be stashed away at the Willard, or in some other place as yet unknown to her. A bank box, a safe with a key.

  — And you were unwell?

  — I was staying at the convent. After my first husband died. There was the accident, and they brought me back to the convent to recuperate. Because I had no family, you see. She stopped. She set her bowl down and lay the spoon flat on the cracker plate, pushing the leftover crackers to one side. He was so terribly tall, she said. Harry was. And with big hands. She folded her own hands together, resting them on the table. He could never keep still, she said. You can see why you make me think of him a little.

  — Always bouncing around, am I?

  — You’re not a guy who gets bored. See? I remember.

  Dolan pushed his bowl away and the spoon left inside it made a sound against the china. The effect was more like a Christmas ornament than a mess kit. He said:

  — And you don’t remember the accident?

  — I don’t remember being hit. But I must have been, because there I was, back at the convent, and they sent an American doctor to look after me. Because of Harry, because he’d been in the army.

  — And the doctor married you.

  — Eric? Yes.

  — The convenience!

  — Very quietly, I think. In a small room.

  Mrs. Hammond came back to remove the bowls. There was no telephone message, she said, when Dolan asked her. Only a wrong number. Heike, newly relieved, tried to pass along the tureen. The housekeeper carried a tray with her and set it down on a side table and took the used dishes and replaced them with what she’d brought: whitefish, pan-fried, and in a sauce; some potatoes in butter and parsley; tiny green peas mixed with smoked ham and sautéed whole onions, little ones, the size of your fingernail.

  — I wish I could tell you more, Heike said. I wish I could remember. I try. But it feels like work. And then I don’t know what I’m making up and what really happened. She turned in her seat: Thank you, Mrs. Hammond. Thank you.

  The woman nodded as she picked up her tray, but did not seem to be nodding particularly at Heike, or in response to anything that had been said.

  — And then we came to New York, Heike said. We lived on Eighty-Sixth Street. But by that time, I already had Daniel. So.

  The fish was a more delicate thing than she would have imagined Dolan ordering, and she wondered if Mrs. Hammond simply chose everything for him: the flatware, the menus, the linens in the bedroom.

  — The girl you saw at the pond, Dolan said. The little girl who disappeared. I upset you earlier, when I said it sounded just like your sister.

  — You wonder if I’m losing my marbles. Seeing Lena in the woods?

  — You’ve been through your share of hard times.

  — No. No, this girl is quite different. She could almost be Daniel’s sister, not mine: blond and with such light eyes. Lena was dark, with dark hair. My father used to say she was the gypsy coachman’s daughter, but he only laughed half the time. There was a basket on the table, and Heike reached for it and twisted a piece of bread in her hand until it tore into two pieces. I used to look for her, she said. Lena. On the crowded train in Europe, and then here: in Central Park, or Rockefeller Center. Anywhere there are a lot of faces. I used to comb through, checking always for her dark eyes. But I stopped looking. I had to. She picked the puff of soft crumb out of the middle of the bread and let it rest in the flat of her hand. Some people just stay lost, she said.

  — You’re afraid now that Daniel will stay lost.

  — I feel a little bit lost myself.

  She shifted her plate to one side, and Mrs. Hammond came along to clear up.

  — Do you eat sweets?

  Dolan followed the housekeeper into the house and came out with a bottle of champagne and a silver-wrapped box, smaller than a deck of cards.

  He said he wasn’t one for pastries, so Mrs. Hammond was unlikely to have done any baking. But he had some chocolates for her, just in case. She said she would eat a chocolate, just one, if it were very simple and very sweet.

  Dolan pushed up on the cork with both thumbs and let it fly.

  AFTER THEY’D EATEN, he wanted to walk down to the water. A few extra moments of calm; to Heike, the time felt stolen, breathless. The grass had gone damp with the cooler evening air. Dolan took off his shoes and swung her up onto his back, and they charged the willow trees. Heike clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from shrieking. She hadn’t had a firm hold on his shoulders, and
the sudden speed had nearly capsized her.

  — Some decorum, my dear! He clicked his heels together and she jounced on his back, the long strands of the willow trailing down and playing with her hair like dumb fingers.

  — Yes, of course. Mrs. Hammond is watching! But the moment she said it she felt it must be true and made him turn in a circle so that she could make sure they were quite alone.

  Where the lawn turned to sand, he let her down off his shoulders and politely asked her for his clothes back.

  — Right now?

  — I’m afraid so.

  — But the pants are no good for you anymore! You cut them, snip snip! She tipped her head to one side and made a scissor motion with two fingers.

  — All the same. They are mine, and I did pay for them. Perhaps I can use them as shorts someday.

  — These are really deplorable manners. She was working away to untie the knotted belt that held the pants to her waist. The knot gave, and she stripped the belt out clean and handed it to him. Don’t think I am ever coming back to one of your parties, Mr. Dolan.

  The pants, unbolstered, slipped down off her hips of their own accord.

  — There are limits, Mrs. Lerner, to a man’s generosity. Even as concerns guests. He folded the belt and tucked it into his own back pocket. Now. My trousers.

  She stepped out of the pants and left them on the sand, and he crouched low to retrieve them, then, stopping there instead, he pointed to their shadows, one hand resting high on the inside of her leg.

  There was a little glow coming down from where they’d been sitting on the porch, but the true light now was the moon. The sky had cleared. In shadow, he was not much more than a mushroom. Her loose man’s shirt hung straight off her shoulders like a box. Standing tall over him, Heike might have been a giant.

  A giant on high, wooden stilts: the line of her bare legs stretching long and straight to meet the ground. A heron-maid. She had the silly thought that the shadow matched up more exactly with her true self than a reflection ever had. She straightened, raising her arms high over her head. Suddenly she was amplified, her diaphragm filling and her body—limbs, torso, her neck upon her shoulders—unfolding, link by link, lengthening out like rope.