Arrowood

by Laura McHugh

  —

  I was glad to get back to Arrowood, though the moment I entered the house, I was enveloped by an oppressive dampness that clung to me like a clammy swimsuit. If fall didn’t come in earnest soon, I’d have to get Heaney to chisel my bedroom windows open so that I could sleep at night without sweating through the sheets.

  I climbed the stairs, my hand sticking to the banister, and stopped at the bathroom to brush my teeth. As I stood at the vanity, water seeped over the thin soles of my sandals and in between my toes. “Don’t panic. It’s not a big deal.” I said the words out loud, trying to convince myself. There wasn’t that much water, really, no worse than the first night after my bath. It was probably a slow leak in the bathroom pipes, and I could call Heaney to take care of it in the morning.

  I grabbed towels from the linen closet and squatted down to wipe up the water, making my way toward the tub. The clawed feet were hollow on the back side, and I worked a towel around each one to dry it out. The towel stuck on the last one, and when I yanked it loose, something skittered across the floor and disappeared under the edge of the vanity. I jumped to my feet, momentarily startled, and then knelt down to see what it was: a grimy chunk of plastic about the size of my thumbnail. I picked it up and turned it over, nearly dropping it back onto the floor as I realized what I was holding. A tremor started in my hands and worked its way up through my bones. The piece of plastic was a cracked and timeworn button, a button shaped like a duck, just like the buttons on the blouses my sisters were wearing the day they disappeared. My vision blurred and I squeezed the button against my palm until it cut into my skin.

  I slumped back against the wall, my bare legs sticking to the marble floor, my heartbeat like a door slamming shut, over and over. I traced my fingernail along the button’s curved edge, the once bright yellow duck now dull and faded, the color of a stained tooth. I told myself it was possible that it had been out in the yard all these years and then tracked inside, though I knew that wasn’t likely. I tried to remember whether all the buttons had been intact when the twins disappeared. There was one way to find out.

  I found Josh’s number in the signature line of the last email he’d sent, and I could tell when he answered that he wasn’t expecting to hear from me so soon after I’d left. His low voice resonated in my ear as he said my name. “Arden?”

  “Yeah, I just have a question. I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

  “No, nothing important. Ask away.”

  “In the picture, the one with the twins, can you see how many buttons are on their shirts?”

  “How many buttons?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Sure. Hold on a second, let me check.” I could hear the faint whisper of his breath, and I imagined the phone cradled between his shoulder and jaw as he flipped through the photos. “Looks like…three buttons on one. And three on the other. How many are there supposed to be?”

  I realized I wasn’t sure. “It’s not the number that’s important, I guess. I just wanted to know if it looked like any were missing.”

  He was silent for moment. “Do you want to tell me why?”

  “No. It’s nothing.”

  There was a noise like he was exhaling through his teeth. As the sort of person who couldn’t leave a Rubik’s Cube with the colors mixed up, he was probably having a hard time not pushing for a better explanation, but he let it go. Maybe he felt like he had already pushed me enough for one day. “Well, if you change your mind and want to talk about it, feel free to call back. I’ll be up late.”

  With Josh’s goodbye fading in my ear, I tucked the button into my pocket and moved into the hallway, something completely irrational beginning to crystallize in my mind. Over the years, I had implored psychics, mediums, Ouija boards, a variety of saints, and an invisible God I wasn’t sure existed; all had failed to give me what I wanted. Then, today, I had spoken to the man suspected of taking Violet and Tabitha, and I had seen the last known photo taken of them before they disappeared. Maybe that had been enough, finally, to conjure them. Maybe, somehow, through means I couldn’t begin to understand, my sisters had sent me a sign. For the first time since returning to Arrowood, I stood in front of the twins’ bedroom door and reached out to twist the glass knob.

  The room was musty, like when the twins had colds and Mom would run the humidifier. I flipped the switch, expecting a burst of light that didn’t come. The bulbs had probably burned out. I took several steps forward into the darkness and stopped. I could hear the wind outside, shuffling the leaves of the oak trees against the house. Along the far wall, under the windows, the cribs sat end to end, draped in white sheets.

  I took shallow breaths and moved closer until I could reach out and touch them. The sheets were cool against my fingertips as I pulled them away and dropped them to the floor. My eyes welled up as I made out the familiar bedding with the pink-and-yellow butterflies. No one had stripped the mattresses or made the beds. The blankets in each crib still lay in twisted piles, as though the twins had just woken from a restless sleep. I leaned down to stroke the blanket in Tabitha’s crib, and it felt tacky, moist. I drew back the curtains to let in some moonlight, and my arms froze in place, outstretched. The windowpanes wept. Condensation trickled down and pooled on the sill, swelling the wood. I shivered as though those same drops traced down my scalp, along my spine. At the bottom edge of the glass, water beaded around smudges shaped like tiny fingerprints. I took the button from my pocket and set it on the puddled windowsill.

  Violet? I whispered. Tabitha? I pressed my palm to the cool, wet glass as water slid down my wrist, along my scars.

  CHAPTER 8

  * * *

  As I was getting dressed the next morning, the phone began to ring. I’d only gotten a landline because the Internet package was cheaper with it than without it, and only two people had the number: Heaney and the lawyer, and I had called Heaney on my cell barely ten minutes before to tell him about the leak, so I doubted it was him. I hurried down the stairs, though by the time I reached the kitchen, I’d missed the call. There was one new voicemail.

  “Miss Arrowood? Are you there?” The message continued in silence for several seconds before cutting off, as though the man had been waiting, giving me a chance to pick up, the way people used to do with answering machines. The number was “unknown.” It wasn’t the lawyer. Maybe I’d already made it onto a telemarketing list.

  Heaney arrived, and I waited out on the terrace, distracting myself with the classified section of the newspaper while he banged around inside the house with a giant red toolbox. I circled a few jobs that I thought I might be qualified for: night clerk at the Super 8, gas station attendant, and some sort of phone-answering position that didn’t look entirely legitimate. I couldn’t afford to be terribly choosy. I still had money in my college fund to keep me going for a while, but I wasn’t sure how long it would last.

  “I got you all fixed up,” Heaney said when he finally emerged. “I think it’s just that the tub hadn’t been used in a while. Nothing major. And I got one of your windows open. The rest are being stubborn, but we’ll try again once the weather cools off. I think all the humidity has them swollen shut.”

  “Thanks. One window’s better than none.”

  “You’ve sure got a gorgeous view out here,” Heaney said, wiping his forehead. “If I lived here, I’d eat all my meals at this table, looking right out over the river.”

  “We used to,” I said. “In the summer, anyway. My sisters and I. Mom said it was easier to let the rain and the birds clean up after us.”

  Heaney pressed his lips together. “I’m sorry,” he said. “About your sisters. I wanted to say something sooner, but I didn’t want to upset you by bringing it up. I always wished they’d caught the guy that did it.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Me too.”

  “How’s your mother getting along, anyway?” he asked. “I figured she might be planning on moving back here, now that you have the house.”
<
br />   “No. She seems happy where she is. She got remarried a while ago.”

  Heaney’s posture shifted slightly, and he sucked in his lower lip. It almost looked like he was disappointed. “Well, good for her,” he said. “You tell her I said hello. I’d love to catch up when she comes for a visit.”

  I didn’t bother to tell him that she wouldn’t be coming to visit. I doubted that Mom would ever again set foot in the state of Iowa, let alone in this house. With the exception of her trip to pick me up in Colorado, she had never gone out of her way to see me.

  —

  I was surprised when Mom called not long after Heaney left. Usually I was the one who called her; she rarely reached out unless she had important news, like a death in the family, and I wondered if something had happened to Gary.

  “You never emailed me back,” she said. The Home Shopping Network was blaring in the background. “Don’t tell me you went and talked to him.”

  It took me a moment to realize she was talking about Josh Kyle. “I wanted to see what he had to say.”

  “I don’t care what he has to say, and you shouldn’t, either. He wants to dig up the most terrible thing to ever happen to our family and sell it for his own benefit. I’m telling you now, I don’t want you having any part in it.”

  “He’s a decent guy,” I said. “He’s just looking for answers.”

  “Lord help me, Arden, it’s closing in on twenty years. There are no answers. It’s time you got that through your head.”

  I wished that for once she would turn down the television when she talked to me. “How can you not want to know?”

  My mother sighed loudly into the phone, and the nasal voice of the woman on the Home Shopping Network was replaced by the soothing drone of the man on the Weather Channel. She was flipping channels, and I knew the conversation was over, that she was seconds away from saying goodbye. I thought of the button, sitting upstairs in the twins’ room. I knew she wouldn’t want to hear about it, yet part of me ached to confide in her.

  She hadn’t always been so closed off, so hard to talk to. I remembered sitting at the dressing table with her when I was little, after my parents had moved into Nana and Granddad’s old room. Nana’s talcum powder and clip-on earrings and Dresden figurines were gone, packed away to Florida, the rosewood dressing table now home to my mother’s blow-dryer and curling iron and hot rollers and cans of Aqua Net hairspray. She had a purple Caboodles makeup case that looked like a tackle box, and I would watch her stroke coat after coat of Maybelline mascara over her pale lashes while she told me stories about things she had done with her friends back in high school. I had never met her old friends, who had gone off to college or gotten married and moved away. She was trying to make new ones, women from the yacht club and the neighborhood, women my father knew. Most of them were older, and a bit too reserved for my mother’s taste. Sometimes Mom would make up my face with glittery eyeliner and blue shadow and a coral lipstick that she let me keep because it made her teeth look yellow. If she was in a good mood, we’d lip-synch in the mirror to a mixtape of Madonna and Cyndi Lauper songs that she only played when Dad wasn’t around, because he didn’t like that kind of music.

  I’d never stopped hoping that that version of my mother might reemerge. She didn’t have as much time for me after my sisters were born. She had been tired and distracted. And after losing the twins, she had sealed off the mothering part of herself, like cauterizing a wound.

  “I almost forgot,” I said before she could hang up. “Dick Heaney said to tell you hello. He wants to see you next time you come visit. He looked really disappointed when I told him you’d gotten remarried.” I wanted to see if she remembered Heaney after all, if she would say anything about how she knew him.

  Mom made a noise in her throat that could have been an acknowledgment or maybe just a swallow of wine that went down wrong, and then she was off the phone.

  —

  I spent the afternoon on Midwest Mysteries, reading through old posts on the Arrowood forum. I was mortified to discover that there was a separate page devoted entirely to me, which Josh Kyle hadn’t mentioned. At the top was a familiar newspaper photo from The Des Moines Register feature titled “Still No Answers”: me, looking out from a window in the twins’ room, my hand pressed against the glass, shortly before we left Arrowood. The picture and story had been widely distributed, and had sparked an intense debate as to whether two uncertain shapes in the window were reflections, tricks of shadow and light, or the ghostly visages of my sisters. Critics of paranormal photography debunked the apparitions as pareidolia, the imagined perception of pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist.

  Grammy had blamed the photograph for directing unwanted attention toward me, for making me known to countless strangers, some who gathered here on the Arden Arrowood page, apparently, to discuss my mental state, comment on photos, and list the questions they would ask if they met me in person. And yet the forum was not about me, exactly. They wanted to know what it was like to be in my shoes, to be part of a famous tragedy. I was a symbol to them, of mystery and suffering. My identity wasn’t my own; I was the twins’ surviving sister, someone wholly defined by what I was missing.

  There was a picture of me with Dr. Endicott, standing outside his office in Kaufmann Hall, and I couldn’t stop staring at it. I wondered if someone from the history department had posted it to the forum, or if it had been dug up elsewhere on the Internet. I stood two feet away from him in the photo, my shoulders slumped, my arms hanging awkwardly at my sides. My focus was somewhere between my professor and the person taking the picture, as though I didn’t dare make eye contact with either one. Dr. Endicott smiled winningly, gazing directly at the camera.

  The alarm on my phone chimed to remind me that Ben would be picking me up for dinner in fifteen minutes. I turned off my laptop and sprinted upstairs, where I hastily brushed my hair and smeared on lip gloss. I dug through my closet in search of an appropriate outfit for dinner at the club, immediately ruling out ninety-nine percent of my wardrobe, which was either ultra-casual (jeans and sweats) or pseudo-professional (bland turtlenecks and slacks from JCPenney that I had bought to wear to work in the history department). Finally I located an emerald-green maxi dress that I had scored on clearance at Target, my go-to outfit for Friday night happy hours with the other graduate assistants, when we would complain about our shrinking stipends and gossip about our professors and then go home before we got drunk enough to talk about anything too personal.

  The dress was badly wrinkled from being crammed in the bottom of a box, and while I knew there must be an iron somewhere in the house, I didn’t have time to look for it. The lower half of my body would be hidden by a tablecloth for most of the evening, anyway, and a cardigan would cover the top. I hurried past the ornate mirror in the hall without glancing at my reflection. I wanted to look nice for Ben, and if I didn’t, it was better not to see it confirmed in the mirror. On the way down the stairs, I tucked my hair behind my ears and then untucked it and fluffed it with my fingers, knowing that it would quickly revert back to its original state regardless of what I did to it.

  Grammy had generously called my hair “sandy,” not “dishwater blond,” which would have been more accurate. I’d never had pretty platinum hair like the twins, not even when I was a baby. I often wondered how Violet and Tabitha would have looked as they aged, if their hair would have darkened over time to match mine or stayed light like our mother’s. If they were still alive, they would be nearly nineteen years old. College students. Almost everything about them would have changed by now, each tiny tooth lost and replaced with a grown-up one, smooth baby skin freckled and blemished and scarred, limbs stretched, bodies filled out, voices altered. It killed me to think that I might have passed them on the street, that it would be possible to look right at them and not recognize them, not know we were sisters. I wanted to believe that an internal device would somehow sense our shared blood and sound an alarm.

&
nbsp; Ben was walking up to the door as I opened it, and he grinned when he saw me. He wore a suit jacket and pressed khakis with a crisp button-down shirt, and I felt sloppy and childish in my wrinkled dress. Ben looked like a real adult, which he was, and I wondered if he still had his collection of nerdy T-shirts—The X-Files and Star Trek and Mystery Science Theater—tucked away in a box somewhere. We climbed into his car and set off down the river road, the Mississippi restless and glittering as the evening sun angled down over the bluffs and the tops of the cottonwood trees.

  —

  The restaurant at the club was nearly empty when we arrived, and Ben and I were seated at an intimate table with a river view, though the view was rapidly diminishing as the sky dulled and dusk crept in. I could just make out the stilted cabins on the opposite bank, a darkening thicket of trees rising up behind them, headlights ghosting along a narrow road. A teenage waitress greeted us with a self-conscious smile, her chapped lips refusing to part and expose her teeth. She felt around in her apron pocket for her order pad, mumbling that she knew it was in there somewhere, and then finally gave up and wrote our orders on her hand. Ben and I sat in silence for a minute, watching the sky and river turn black. I tore open a packet of saltines from the cracker basket, spraying crumbs across the table, and then set them down without eating them.

  “Sorry we didn’t get much of a chance to talk the other day at the office,” Ben said finally, his smile relaxing me. “Are you settling in okay?”