The Last to See Me

by M Dressler

  My sense is, Mrs. Fanoli really wants to say more, but she’s angling for a visit from you. She likes to make people come to the garden. I think you ought to go see her there. It’s not far, just south of town. Across the cove. Mrs. F. is almost always there, and she knows everything, not just about the flowers, but the village. Her memory apparently goes a long way back. She said she’d love to talk to you. If you want, I’ll go with you. I explained the urgency to her, and how important this could be, not just for us but for the village.

  I hope you’re making progress. Everyone is upset and anxious. They want to have this done.

  Ellen

  She taps the screen and leans back, into the curl of her chair.

  In just such a way would Quint and I curl against each other on the beach, with the fire that he’d started glowing. He’d tell me, excitedly, about how we should all try to make great successes out of our lives and not do things the way they’ve always been done before, but try new ideas, and make changes when we had to, and not be afraid of the unknown.

  “I know you’re here,” Ellen whispers. “I can feel you.”

  The room is very still. Ellen is unafraid. I can feel it. This is something new, now.

  It happens like this sometimes. The living feel the darkness and know they’re not alone in it. In every house, there is some space, unfilled. In that corner. Under that chair. In the shadow of a shelf. In a closet. It’s when the living are the loneliest that they feel our possibility the most.

  “I feel you. Friend. I’m not going to cry anymore. Thank you. Thank you, for that.”

  She isn’t afraid—though her breath is coming faster now and she’s leaning a bit forward, away from me. Alice was like this, too, in the beginning. Wondering what sort of companion I was or might be. If I was going to stay for a long, long time—as I’d stayed with all the Lambrys.

  Ellen isn’t a Lambry. She isn’t one of the family I haunt—but it’s strange, I can’t help myself. I’ve grown to like her. And I think, like Alice, she needs a friend. And she isn’t like Pratt. She isn’t the one who hired the hunter, brought him in; she’s only trying to work and make her own way, just as I did.

  Maybe it’s time for all of us to make a change. To think about the future. After Pratt’s gone, after he imagines he’s cleaned the Lambry House. Maybe it’s time I started thinking about putting the name Lambry and all Lambry things behind me. Maybe it’s been long enough. A new century. A new millennium. Past new.

  A good housekeeper knows when the house needs airing, when the sheets need wringing, when a room has gone sickly and stale. Mrs. Folde’s room, after Infant Joseph’s funeral—she didn’t want her pillows changed. She lay there in bed, day after day, giving milk for the living twin but nothing else. She wouldn’t get up. She wouldn’t move. Until I told her I’d been mending Mr. Folde’s shirts myself, and darning his underclothes, and teaching the children to read poems and stories from King Arthur and His Knights. Then the blood had gushed back into her cheeks and she had me help her get up, holding onto my waist tightly, like a raft.

  For a while we were friends, even close, with Frances gone away to the Russian River and expecting her own baby. I helped Mrs. Folde find the strength to go on. She let me draw closer to the children, and teach them the stories I knew, about Ireland and the far darrig. I even thought we might be able to share secrets one day, that I could tell her about Quint and our plans.

  “I’m so glad you’re still here,” Ellen whispers now. “I didn’t want you to go, ever. I’m sorry I wasn’t a better friend. I’m sorry I didn’t always know what you needed … I didn’t know how bad things were. I truly didn’t. I tried to help you. Remember? Remember how I called you and tried to catch you? But you didn’t come, not until it was too late. It wasn’t my fault. But I’m sorry, Kittums, really sorry. Will you forgive me? Before you go on to that better kitty-place? Is that why you’re here?” She puts her hand out from the blanket, stroking the air. “So I can tell you I’m sorry for being so distracted by everything, all this nasty, ugly ghost business … I’m so sorry. I hope it’s all better now. For you. You sweet, silly kitty.”

  She thinks I’m an animal.

  Or she thinks I’m nasty. Ugly.

  She thinks I’m—

  Eyes. Fur.

  She thinks I’m a companion, with nails.

  Anger.

  Anger.

  Anger.

  If you think so, then I am.

  It takes only a few minutes to be strangled. For sight to go black. For the windpipe to close, for you to feel your head bang against a door, a wall, a ceiling, and no way through. You claw, but there is no room left for you on earth. She screams, and no one comes to soothe her.

  16

  I can’t do it, Philip.”

  “You can.”

  “I can’t. I’m telling you.”

  “Please, Ellen. Try. Tell me what you remember.”

  “I can’t.”

  Pratt gets up from his hotel bed and paces in front of her. She sits on the edge of the bed with his coat wrapped around her. I watch from outside the window. They look small again, as they did on the porch of the Lambry House. Like two bruised toys in a doll’s house.

  “Try again.”

  “I woke up. It was all over.”

  “Before that.”

  Ellen fits her hair behind her ears. Her hands are still shaking.

  I’m sorry I wasn’t a better friend. I tried to help you. Remember?

  “Can you focus on a few details? Anything?”

  “Anger. I felt it, all around me.” Her eyes squeeze shut. “Like a wave.”

  “All right. What else?”

  “The blanket.”

  It coiled around her. She couldn’t move. When she tried to move, I held her even closer.

  “Then it lifted me. Up into the roof. High, into the peak. And there was water, rising from underneath me. I was pinned against the roof of the house, and I couldn’t move, and the water was rising and I was trapped and I couldn’t breathe and I didn’t know how to—to hold onto …”

  … that last chestful of air, ready to burst inside you. That awful clawing at the back of your throat, that wants to pry your mouth open, suck in the water. But you don’t want to give in, you don’t, you don’t …

  Pratt stops his pacing. “I’m so sorry, Ellen. This is my fault.”

  Ellen opens her eyes. She says nothing.

  “I broke something belonging to it today,” Pratt goes on. “Trying to get it to focus its anger on me. Something that mattered to it. But now it looks like it chose you instead.”

  He’s wrong. It was that Ellen didn’t choose me.

  “Why, when it’s never hurt me before?”

  He stares across the room, without seeing. “Something is shifting.”

  Yes. I think so too.

  “Maybe because I’ve been helping you help the Danes?”

  “You’ve been helping them all along.”

  “But now I’m helping you to kill it. I was sending you a message when it came. I thought the hissing was my cat.”

  “I should have seen this coming.” He locks his hands behind his neck, gripping it. “Like Manoel.”

  They each turn away from the other. Locked in silence. I’m so close, just outside the window, yet I’m nothing to them, I’m nothing compared to the weight of what they’re feeling. Sometimes, truly, it’s hard to watch the living live, and to be left out of throbbing life, even when it’s unhappy.

  He turns. “I need to get to your place right now, Ellen, if you’ll let me. To see what kind of residue is there. If you think … if you think you can be left alone here for a little while?”

  She lets out a strange little laugh. “Do you think it really matters where I am? Won’t it be able to—to get me wherever I am, now? If it’s that angry with me?”

  “Maybe. But it’s made a mistake this time.”

  “How?”

  “It’s revealed something about its
elf. You made it manifest. You said you thought it was your cat. Twice you’ve said it—that was the first thing you said to me, when you burst in here tonight. You said you thought you were whispering to your dead cat. I think, maybe, this is a ghost who doesn’t like to be reminded how dead it is. What a beast it is. It doesn’t want to be reminded it’s a creature. That might be our way in. Not smashing the globe it makes”—he turns around, gazing out the dark window—“but smashing its world, what it thinks it is. No special, privileged, indestructible thing. It isn’t. Nothing but a lowly beast.”

  You can try as hard as you want, Mr. Pratt. You can call me names and throw out your cruel ideas, but I know you’re more dangerous than Ellen. So I won’t lose my temper, not this close to you.

  “Give me your address, Ellen. And your key.”

  “I don’t think I even locked the door. I just ran to my car.”

  “Can I bring you some clothes back? Anything important?”

  “There isn’t much of anything in the house. It’s a rental. But I’ve got clothes upstairs.”

  Pratt tells her to keep her phone handy and to call if anything happens or starts to happen. Ellen stands up and suddenly throws her arms around him. He didn’t expect that. Nor did I—but the living can do strange things when they’re frightened. He gives her a short, stiff, hunched squeeze, like an embarrassed bear balancing on a tree limb too small for it.

  “I’ll be back as quick as I can.”

  “Please.”

  17

  A half-moon rises over the woods. In the trees, animals crouch in the blue shade and wait. Pratt’s car bumps its way over the ruts and fallen needles, in between the dark cabins. The living inside them are asleep, the fires in their stone hearths gone out. A hunting bird, a night owl, flies overhead. Below my skirt a snake coils, flicking its tongue over its back. It sees Pratt’s lights and hurries, in a wave, away.

  Pratt pushes the door to Ellen’s house open. He goes straight in. He doesn’t seem afraid at all. I stand outside the window, bathed by the moon. Inside, flashing pieces of broken glass lie everywhere. The lights are shattered. Broken plates litter the floor. Ellen’s comfortable chair has been tossed over and rests on its shoulders. The baseboards are all mucked, streaked with long, gray smudges, as if by a muddy skirt.

  But of course, it must be that the animals got in here, I tell myself. Soon after Ellen ran away. Or else some of the young pipe-smokers, who still like to come into the woods and find a hideaway and be forgetful. Not me. I would never make such a mess. Not me, always so proud of my work—who kept the Folde house so clean and bright that Mr. Folde started to praise my talents, even if he looked unhappy himself. I was glad that Mrs. Folde kept her promise to herself and kept him at bay, telling him she couldn’t get and bury any more children.

  Pratt picks through the wreckage, holding his hand to his chest. Near the armchair he finds Ellen’s tumbled writing slate.

  … really wants to say more … she’s angling for a visit …

  He picks it up, slides it inside his coat. Now he sees something else. The tall shelf next to the mantelpiece with the picture of the father and baby. When he comes close to the picture, one of the books leaning over beside it loses its balance and falls from the shelf. A stray piece of paper comes to rest at his feet, fluttering. He picks it up and stares at it for a long time. I can’t see what it says from my hiding place in the moonlight. He folds it and puts it, too, in his pocket.

  He looks around the room again. He coughs and wipes his mouth as if the muck he’s breathing in is too much for him. He goes upstairs and studies Ellen’s tumbled bedroom. He starts putting some of her clothes in a bag. He looks around the loft one last time and seems confused. Maybe he thought he’d find Alice’s robe spread out on the bed for him? I could have done that, if I’d wanted to. But I won’t be so obvious. He has to think he’s solving a puzzle all by himself. I have to let him be the hunter he thinks he is. I won’t smash what he thinks of himself, the way he wants to smash me. What a cruel thing to do. Why would a ghost be cruel? Instead, I’ll use what he is against the man himself.

  At the hotel again, he stands outside his numbered door. He waits, listening. Ellen is inside. He doesn’t know, as I do, from sliding in and out of the keyhole, that she’s lying down. But he must guess because he turns away. I follow him down again to the hotel’s lobby, where he takes a chair close to the great stone fireplace outside the dining room and sets down the bag he’s filled with Ellen’s clothes. He orders a strong drink from the sleepy waiter. He sits for a long time, staring into the dying embers. He sits for so long without moving that I finally grow tired of waiting for him to stir, and abandon him. He can have his cushion. I’ll have mine. I can’t be thinking about why he looks so unhappy, lost, even though it should have made me happy to see him that way—staring into the fire, his graying whiskers growing in, time forcing itself through him, one needle after another.

  I find them both in the breakfast room the next morning, Ellen just coming down.

  “I was worried,” she says, shivering. “I fell asleep in the room and then I woke up this morning and couldn’t find you.”

  “I had my phone off.”

  “Is everything … What did you find at my house?”

  “Sit down, why don’t you, and I’ll tell you.”

  He hands her a sweater from the bag of her clothes, and she wraps it around her shoulders.

  “Thanks for bringing my things. Why didn’t you wake me up when you got back?”

  “It was late. I didn’t want to disturb you. And I needed time to … think. Have some breakfast and coffee.”

  “I’m not hungry. Are you all right? You seem—”

  “Slightly hung over. I’ve been sleeping in a chair.”

  “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Lying upsets my routine.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You’ve been lying to me.”

  What? What’s that? I draw as close as I dare out of the velvet curtain. What has Ellen lied to Pratt about?

  She sits up taller in her chair, calmly. “What do you mean?” she says again.

  “Your place. It was like a storm had broken loose inside. Everything rifled through. You said when you left it that everything looked normal. That as soon as the hallucination was over, everything looked the same.”

  “Because it did.”

  He slides the bag with her things on the floor toward her. He nods to the waiter for more coffee. “A few more personal items for you. Your tablet. And some personal papers.”

  “When I left I just ran. I told you, I didn’t look back to see what or who—”

  “Which brings us to the lie. Can you tell me what, exactly, this is?”

  He takes a folded piece of paper from the top of the bag and drops it on the white tablecloth between them. The name at the top of the paper reads Ellen Lambry DeWight. She looks down at it. And her little face turns to stone.

  Ellen DeWight a Lambry! Ellen. What have you done?

  “How did you get this?” she says stiffly.

  “It fell from a shelf. In front of me. Almost as if someone—or something—wanted me to find it. Interesting, don’t you think?”

  The truth about Ellen. The truth. What a thing to keep quiet all along … so cleverly.

  “You had no business looking at this,” she says.

  “I didn’t have a choice. I told you. It was practically thrown in my face.” He brings his napkin up from his lap and wipes his whiskers with it and tosses it on the table. “Someone clearly wanted me to see this. Fate can be so surprising. It can suddenly decide to be so direct. A death certificate. For one Ellen Lambry DeWight.”

  “That’s not me. That’s my mother.”

  “Yes. I know. I already chased that down. You didn’t think this was an important little tidbit to share with me? That you’re a blood relative of the family whose house is currently being assaulted? Did it ever occur to you that yo
u might have been singled out, last night, in your own home, because of your name? But you didn’t think that was a detail worth sharing with me before I went in. And I’m guessing no one in town knows about your background, either. Am I correct?”

  A Lambry and a liar both! Well, the two go hand in hand, after all. I could have told Pratt that. Look at him. So still. He’s almost as cold as I am. And just as wary, now.

  “I didn’t want anyone to know, Philip.”

  “And why not? Well, we’ll get to that in a moment. What I’m more interested in, Ellen, right now, is why you didn’t tell me.”

  She looks down. But she isn’t sorry. It takes one to know one, Franny used to say.

  “Because it wasn’t important. It’s just a name. A lot of people have it, up north here. There are plenty of branches of the Lambry family. It doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “Let me try this again. Why didn’t you feel the need to tell me you were related to Alice Lambry through your mother? It somehow, I don’t know, slipped your mind?” Poor Pratt. He’s trying so hard not to rage.

  “Of course it didn’t,” she snaps. “How could it? But it doesn’t mean anything. The connection’s so distant. I’m not some heir, somebody close. I’m not entitled to any part of the estate—except what I can earn on commission. By my own effort. I never thought of that house being connected to me anymore than anyone whose last name is King feels entitled to sit on a throne. It’s just a coincidence.”

  “Do you take me for a fool, Ellen?”

  “No,” she nearly shouts but sees the waiter looking at her and, blushing, calms down. “I’m telling you the truth. Please believe me. Please. There are plenty of Lambry cousins all up and down this coast. It’s just my middle name, a name that gets handed down in my family, like a bad habit. It doesn’t mean what it looks like. I didn’t even know much about the Lambrys until I got here. My name is Ellen DeWight. My father’s name. It’s the only name I use. I don’t even care about that shitty family. Believe me.” She looks as if she wants to cry. But if I were Pratt, I wouldn’t believe it.