The Uninvited

by Cat Winters

  I recoiled. “I don’t understand! It doesn’t make sense. Why is it him? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Ivy . . .” She kneeled down in front of me. “My poor girl . . .”

  “I was with him.” I shook the newspaper in her face until she blinked and flinched. “With him. Multiple times. How could I have been with a man my family killed over Billy’s death?”

  Mama’s chin shook, and she could no longer look me in the eye.

  “What?” I slammed the paper to the floor and heard a rip in the newsprint. “Talk to me. Why won’t anyone talk to me? What’s happening?”

  “It wasn’t Billy’s death that set them off.”

  “I don’t . . .” I wrinkled my brow. “Then what? What set them off?”

  “This flu . . . it’s taken so many lives.” She bent her face toward her knees and grabbed hold of her stomach, as if she shared my same knife blade of pain. Her mouth twisted into a grimace, and she squeezed her eyes shut tight, deepening the lines of her crow’s-feet. “Your father got it into his head that the Germans dumped the germs into an American theater,” she continued. “He wanted to spill German blood for revenge. I know he was sometimes cold and harsh, that it often seemed he didn’t care, but he loved you so much, Ivy.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Yes”—she nodded—“he truly did. He said that hearing you play the piano was the best part of his day after toiling in the fields until his back and fingers ached. He loved you so much that he . . .” She covered her eyes with one hand, and her lips quavered and sputtered. Her nose ran. “He loved you so much, Ivy . . .” She braced her left hand on her lower back. “He loved you so much that he killed a man.”

  I braced my hands against the floor. Daniel’s face stared up at me from the newspaper down below, his mouth set in that defiant pose, his eyes both frightened and furious as he stood for a camera that captured the images of Germans.

  I shut my eyes against the sight of him in that hellish article that didn’t make one damn bit of sense. “I don’t . . .” I shook my head. “I don’t understand anything that you’re saying. What’s happening here? What’s happening?”

  Mama broke into tears. I kept my eyes closed, but I heard her weep, the same way she had cried the night Father and Peter slammed their way inside the house with blood on their clothes and their fingers—while I, fresh out of bed from the flu, had followed after everyone in my nightgown.

  I followed after them, and no one but Mama had paid me any heed.

  I stood there and watched them . . . and no one had noticed.

  I opened my eyes. The fingers of my right hand reached down to the Sentinel and dared to curl back the front page with the soft crinkle of newsprint. On page 3, a list awaited—a collection of names of the Buchanan residents who had perished from the flu from October 1 through October 5, 1918. My pulse pounded in my ears; the air in the house felt too thick to breathe.

  Eight of the names of the dead jumped off the page and pierced my heart:

  May Belmont Dover, widow of Edward C. Dover, aged 25

  Howard Greene, owner, Hotel America, aged 42

  Lucas Hart, American Protective League volunteer, aged 22

  Benjamin Kelley, Negro, aged 19

  Margaret O’Conner, grandmother and mother, aged 47

  Wyatt Pettyjohn, farmer, aged 25

  Ivy Rowan, daughter of Frank Rowan, aged 25

  Ruth Sellman, widow of Jesse Sellman, aged 26

  I rose to my feet, my legs burning to escape, to keep going, to keep wandering—to run.

  Others, May had said, they roam the earth, unsettled, restless, unsure what to do or where they belong.

  “This . . . no . . .” I kicked the newspaper away and backed toward the door. “I speak with all sorts of people out there. Not just Daniel and May and Wyatt. I’ve been driving an ambulance around town, helping people in need—people stuck in their homes because they can’t get any care . . .”

  Some spirits get stuck in the places where they died.

  I squeezed my head between my hands. Pain simmered across my skull the way a fever burns in a brain until your very soul feels on fire. “Don’t sit there and tell me the flu took my life,” I said through blinding waves of pressure. Stinging black spots danced before my eyes. My ears rang with a screeching holler that couldn’t be silenced no matter how hard I swallowed. “We’re all alive. Everyone I see out there is alive.”

  “Ivy . . .” Mama—just a blurry movement of arms and legs on the ground—fetched a handkerchief from the pocket of her robe. “The influenza has taken the lives of ninety-three Buchanan residents just in these first two weeks of October. If you add Wilhelm Schendel’s death to the count, plus those of three young Red Cross volunteers killed in a horrible train accident shortly before we lost you . . .”

  “No.” My back banged against the door, and the cold knob dug into my spine.

  She wiped her eyes. “That makes ninety-seven brand-new October souls from this one small town alone. Lord knows how many Buchanan servicemen have perished overseas or in training camps during that same amount of time.”

  “Stop!” I slapped my hands over my ears. “Stop saying these things. This is a terrible trick you’re playing. Why are you saying these things?”

  “I’m sorry, Ivy, but it’s God’s honest truth. I see you so clearly that it breaks my heart. I know it means that the wall between the living and the dead has cracked wide open, and more and more people will be lost in the coming days. I wish I could hold you and comfort you. I wish that you could comfort me . . .”

  I cowered against the door and grabbed my chest and remembered the agony of my lungs suffocating with fluid. I shut my eyes and fought to push away the memory of my own sufferings from the influenza—memories that crouched in my brain, hiding behind all my other recent recollections, like a naughty child avoiding punishment.

  “Please . . . don’t be frightened.” My mother got to her feet and stood up tall. “I’m helping those in need like you asked. I went to Polish Hall and saw the lack of care, and I complained to the city’s Committee of Public Safety. We’re going to be recruiting more volunteers and opening more emergency hospitals. I’ll do my best to save lives in your name. You don’t need to worry about a thing anymore, sweetheart. And Granny Letty is always here, watching over me . . .”

  I turned away from the rocking chair, for I saw her—Granny Letty, with her silver hair pinned in a topknot and her gray eyes crinkling with a smile.

  “Go back to that young German man,” said Mama, her voice as soft as when she used to read me stories of castles and magic and airy promises of happily ever after. “Go take comfort with him and everyone else you find out there. Enjoy yourself. Be free.” She squeezed her arms around her middle. “I’ll think of you every time I hear a strain of music, and I’ll tell myself, ‘My Ivy is in those notes. I know she is. I can hear her.’”

  I turned and blew out of the house with a slam of the door that rattled across the windows and set the dogs barking. Tears swam in my eyes and turned the road ahead of me into a long and wavering black snake, but I gritted my teeth and pounded my soles against gravel all the way back to downtown Buchanan. For that’s all I seemed fated to do—to wander, to fret, to cling to the terrible troubles of the world.

  PUBLIC NOTICE

  In response to the recent epidemic of influenza, the local Board of Health and Committee of Public Safety, in conjunction with the Buchanan medical community and Mayor Hoyt, has decreed that after October 12, 1918,

  1.Schools, churches, chapels, meeting halls, theaters, and moving picture houses shall be closed and remain closed until further notice.

  2.Individuals caught spitting, coughing, and sneezing without a handkerchief in public shall be arrested and lectured on the dangers of influenza.

  3.Public dancing and public funerals shall be prohibited.

  4.Hospitals shall be closed to visitors.

  5.The Board strongly advises against
public assembly at any time.

  L. G. Carlisle

  Medical Health Officer

  Chapter 25

  May had said so much at her kitchen table. She said so much and knew about all of our secret habits, and yet she seemed to remain as ignorant as I.

  Some spirits get stuck in the places where they died, she had told me as she sat before her Ouija board with the love for her husband swimming in her eyes. Some struggle to complete a task they didn’t finish when they were alive. Others, they roam the earth, unsettled, restless, unsure what to do or where they belong. And then there are the lucky ones . . .

  Beneath the starry sky of that black and bitter-cold October night, I traversed downtown Buchanan via River Street, parallel to Willow Street. The jazz danced its way around the dark corners and leapt over the brick buildings with unbridled bursts of energy. It beckoned. It tempted. It pulled with all its musical might. The notes wiggled through my blood and pumped through my heart and told me that people still found the strength to pick up instruments and dance and drink as if the world hadn’t cut off their lives in their prime of youth and health.

  They accept their fate and just enjoy themselves.

  Everything seemed so clear out there on the streets. Somehow, the music made it all make sense. If I just let everything go—if I abandoned my troubles and stopped worrying about the world collapsing into a pile of rubble if I wasn’t there to save everyone—I could go to the party. And I could stay.

  Because I could not stop for Death, wrote Emily Dickinson, long ago, He kindly stopped for me . . .

  I passed a portion of town from which I could see the back side of the Hotel America and its little flag tower that shot toward the moon-streaked clouds. I thought of Mr. Greene, still working for people like Lucas and me, despite what he’d said: I had that same illness myself. Knocked me clear off my feet right here at the front desk. His son Charlie had swept the lobby floor, not paying Mr. Greene or me any mind, and we went about our business as if nothing had changed—as if none of us were stuck where we perished. Or wandering, waiting to be told what to do and where to go.

  I WIPED MY EYES with the back of my sleeve and knocked on May’s tapioca-colored door, which looked slate gray and almost stonelike in the unkind darkness of night. The three o’clock hour must not have arrived yet, for she opened the door, alone, in her red silk robe, and she smiled at me with a genuine look of hospitality that managed to warm my blood a tad.

  “You’re back.” She reached out her hand and held fast to my fingers. “What a lovely surprise.”

  “Oh . . . May . . .” I wrapped my free arm around her and broke into tears against her shoulder.

  “What’s wrong?” She patted my back above my spine. “Oh, poor butterfly. Did you and your German quarrel?”

  “You said that you had a sharp headache,” I said into her perfumed silk below my lips, “and that you sat down for a spell. You said you thought God might have sent this flu to help all the Widow Street girls join their fallen husbands.”

  “Yes.” She nodded, her head against mine. “That’s what I did—and still do—believe.”

  “Oh, May . . .” I choked on the words that tried to push through my tears. My throat closed up, and I imagined Daniel with that rope squeezed around his windpipe until he couldn’t manage another breath.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong, Ivy?”

  “It’s not a haunting. Eddie’s not coming back to visit the living.”

  Her fingers went still on my back, and I felt her entire body grow cold against me.

  “What are you talking about?”

  I swallowed. “You never got out of that chair.”

  She pulled away from me.

  I took hold of both her hands before she could back out of reach. “We’re both like Eddie, May. Both of us—the flu saw to that. My mother just told me. I saw our names in the newspaper. And my German . . . he’s the one . . .” I nodded as if the gesture would fill in for my unspoken words, but May’s brown eyes remained wide and utterly perplexed. Her irises darted back and forth, scanning my face. “Daniel is the one who was in the store when my father and brother attacked,” I continued. “They killed him. They killed my Daniel—because of me. Because I had the flu, and they blamed the Germans.”

  “I don’t . . .” She wrinkled her forehead. “What are you . . . ?”

  “Ninety-seven people have died in Buchanan during these first two weeks of October. Ninety-seven . . . and counting.”

  “But . . . I don’t . . .”

  “It seems we’re part of those ninety-seven, May.” I swallowed. “This killer flu, it granted your wish. It did indeed help you to join your fallen husband.”

  “No.” She breathed a small laugh. “That’s not true. You’re terribly confused, Ivy.”

  “My mother told me. She gave me those statistics. We’re part of those statistics.”

  “Eddie wouldn’t keep leaving me if I were like him. He’d take me with him.”

  “Come with me.” Still holding her hands, I tugged her toward me and the open doorway, managing to move her two steps forward. “Please, come out of this house for a while and join me for some music and drinks. And when Eddie returns, you can tell him where you’ve been. Maybe you’ll both become the lucky ones—the ones who accept their fate and just enjoy themselves.”

  “I can’t leave.”

  “Yes you can.” My own feet crossed the threshold to her porch. “There’s a party every night, just down the street. Can’t you hear the jazz?”

  We both craned our heads in the eastward direction of the lodge, but only a soft bleat of the horns traveled the distance to May’s residence.

  “I’m not going anywhere without Eddie.” She wrenched her hands out of mine. “He’s coming back soon, and I’m going to be here. I’m going to be here and pretend like nothing is wrong.” She turned and whisked toward her bedroom with her red silk swishing across her calves.

  “No, don’t pretend.” I followed after her. “Daniel pretended, and it only made things so much worse for me.”

  “Eddie!” May tore inside her room and yanked down the covers of her empty bed. “Eddie, where are you? Where are you? I need you—now!” She dropped to her knees on the floor with her eyelet bedspread clutched in both hands. “Eddie!”

  I knelt beside her, resting my knees against a fuzzy rug of black and gold. “It’s all right.”

  “Eddie!” She bent over at the waist and cried into the fabric.

  “It’s all right.” I rubbed her back, above the hard ridges of her curled spine and quaking shoulder blades. “He’ll be here soon, and then you can speak to him about what you learned. Both of you can free yourselves and accept your fate, and he’ll likely stay with you for as long as you both want to be together.” I brushed loose curls off the nape of her neck. “But don’t pretend like Daniel and my mother did. It only makes the truth so much harder to swallow. It feels like poison and betrayal when you realize you’ve been sheltered like a child.”

  May eased her cheek against the floor, her chest still bent over her knees. Her lungs expanded and contracted with spasms that jerked her whole body. “We were supposed to have a baby,” she said in a small voice I could just barely hear, “before he left. We kept trying and trying, but I just couldn’t find myself . . . I couldn’t get . . .”

  “I’m so sorry, May.”

  “It’s not fair at all. We had so many plans.”

  “I know.” I nestled a hand over her right shoulder.

  “What’s the point of it all? Why were we born if we were all destined to be snatched away so soon?”

  “I don’t know.” I shook my head. “But I think we’re meant to make the best of it now that we are where we are. And maybe . . . just maybe”—I wound a strand of her black hair around my right pinky until the finger looked stained in ink—“those who survive will come to realize that too much time is spent on killing. They’ll figure out that time is far too prec
ious for all that hate and murder. Maybe, if we do our best to enjoy ourselves, they’ll sense the force of our love and feel the emptiness of our absence, and they’ll be sorry they ever whooped for joy over the idea of war.”

  May closed her eyes and sank her face farther against the snowy-white eyelet.

  “Do you want me to leave, May?” I asked. “Or do you want me to stay until he arrives?”

  She slowed her breathing. “Your father and brother gave him to you, then.”

  I sank back on my heels. “I beg your pardon?”

  “They gave you the German . . . if he’s the one they killed.”

  I swallowed down a dry patch as sharp as a razor blade. “That wasn’t their intention, I can assure you of that.”

  “But it happened just the same. I like that.” She smiled. “I like that love sprang out of murder. It makes me feel a little better.” She closed her eyes again, and her lashes fluttered against her skin. “I’ve always enjoyed love stories. Men might call them silly and sentimental, but they all just want to be loved, too.” She inhaled a long breath through her nostrils. “Tell me your whole story before you leave.”

  “What story? My life is so dull, May. I’m sure, compared to you—”

  She took hold of my knee and tucked it beneath her right arm. “Tell me the story of you and your German. I want to hear about two people not meant to find each other who ended up tangled up in each other’s lives and deaths. And give it a happy ending, even if you don’t believe it will come true.”

  I pulled a stray piece of my hair away from my mouth. “I don’t know if it will truly make you feel any better . . .”

  “It will. Please . . . tell me.”

  With a sigh, I stretched my legs out in front of me and leaned back on the palms of my hands. As she wished, I sat with her for a spell, and I told her a war-torn love story about an American recluse and a German deserter who had never once crossed paths in life.

  Chapter 26