The Last to See Me

by M Dressler

  “It’s a little surprise we have tonight, boys! All hands on deck! We cut and run. Not what we’d planned. But we have to keep Mr. Lambry’s lumber safe.”

  “But Captain,” I heard young Albert shout into the rising wind, “why do we have to—I thought it wasn’t till morning that we would—?”

  “We don’t want to fall under this wind, son, and get smashed on our own rocks. We cut, we run. Now!”

  It was exactly what the dogholes were meant for, and why they worked the coves. Because they were trim and fast and could turn on nothing but a prayer. I heard the Lorna’s deep engines roar to life, and the fireman clanging and bringing up her head of steam. I felt her backing and turning just as flashes of lightning started to break across the night sky at the porthole glass. One. Two. Three. And then light and a clap at the same time, so close it nearly shook me from my hiding place. A strange, long shudder followed, as if the ship were letting go of something she couldn’t keep. A terrible crash jolted it.

  “Clear that mast, please. Now!”

  My Da said that when the winds shifted sou’sou’east with no warning, a schooner must clear the cove in five minutes, or face a crushing wall of air. I balanced myself and clung tight to the ropes. The wind had felled a mast, as I’d seen happen to other ships, but she could use her steam to drive herself out before the squall came and pushed her back in again. You see it often enough, my Da had said. But I’d never been so close to it as this, rattling inside the hull, holding tight as it rose and pitched and a terrible grating noise sang all through the beams, sounding like shrieking horses trapped between two walls. I hung onto the barrels and to my travel case and felt water splashing at my heels; it was so cold it burned me, the same burning I’d felt when I’d gone swimming up to my waist, with Quint at the beach, both of us without our stockings, our hands holding onto each other and bobbing in the waves as we laughed and tried to keep straight and true.

  Then came the crack of window-glass breaking, letting in wind and rain. I could see by quick bursts of lightning that the clouds were scudding low and fast, and so were we. I held tight to my beam. Voices shouted and swore and grew louder, almost panicked. Someone called for the fireman. Another that the engines were dying.

  “We’ll be carried too far! Lively now, boys! See to the timber! I’ll be damned if Lambry sinks us by loading on too much of his—”

  I strained to find some break in the wind, a space without some shouting in it. A keening sound, from deep inside the ship, came through my boots. For an instant, I had a sickening feeling of being launched—then I was rolling on one side of the hold, and falling, as if into a pit.

  “The captain’s let her loose! The captain, he’s trying to run ahead of—”

  What did that mean? I found another beam with mice running across it and used it to steady myself and pull myself out of the rising water. Where were we? Was the Lorna doing what I had seen other ships do—flying past the lighthouse in a gale, dim and gray, bow streaming ahead on a white sea—running out the storm?

  Cold water above my ankles now. My skirt was beginning to float.

  “You! Albert! Go with the lifeboat, son! Make for the lighthouse! Hold fast! Tell your father—”

  Were we near the Point, so fast? I had come back to the very place I’d run away from.

  The captain’s calls were drowned. The Lorna went on pitching and heaving. There was too much silence, all at once. I can’t hear them shouting, I thought. And I could no longer hear the ringing of the fireman’s warning bell.

  I let go of the beam at my head and, as best I could by the flashing light, pushed against water up to my shins now and found the stairs that led to the leaking hatch. I called out, “I’m here! I’m here!” Because there would be someone to hear me soon, surely, and the hatch would be unlocked and I’d be hoisted up, grabbed, steadied, and freed. In the next crash of lightning I saw my valise floating by and wanted suddenly to be rid of everything, everything in my past, Quint and the Lambrys and all that had happened to me, everything I’d ever fretted and worried over. What did any of it matter, now? I shoved the case aside, shouting, and the hull shrieked and I was pitched back into it again, into cold, cold water, and I felt the ship slowly turning on her side, water pouring in from one direction now as I turned with it, rolling in my skirt, like a body into a shroud. I felt my foot wedge under a piece of metal of some kind, and then I knew that I was going to die in this darkness with the black water hurling down on me.

  But why poor me, who only ever lived her life as best she could? I thought, queerly calm, as the lightning ripped and the hold turned into a bright, watery mirror, as if it wanted me to see for myself the sinking of the ship around me, and only one eye, one broken window, shining above the black sea. One way out. But if I’m so little, so nothing, I thought, again strangely calm, shouldn’t that be of some use to me? I jerked at my leg with both arms, with all my might, and got my foot free and with a mighty push clawed and swam toward the broken porthole and felt myself cut and sucked through it, kicking and kicking until I was flailing by the ship’s frozen rudder. But no, I had to get away, because that was sinking, too. I kicked in my heavy skirt out into the open sea and the backing wind, and I could just make out the whirl of the lighthouse at the Point, the only light I could see as the waves cut my face. The great smoking flash that was the Lorna went down beside me, her load of wood still strapped to her, all that wood that might have carried me, going down. Below me, my legs were already tiring, and my skirt was too heavy, and my long wet braid was uncoiled and pulling.

  It’ll be over soon, I told myself.

  The skipping beam of the lighthouse, instead of drawing closer, grew small, smaller. I was drifting away.

  The tide was too strong for me to kick against, even if my feet hadn’t already turned to lead and my eyes grown heavy. How strange that you might, at the very end, be glad if you could go back to the place you’d just escaped from. Go back and tell Mrs. Folde what Mr. Folde had done and hold him accountable. Go back and say goodbye to the children, each one. How beautiful the light looked, as it dotted and drifted away. The sirens were only now sounding, someone seeing a struggling lifeboat, maybe, and knowing something was terribly wrong. Mr. McHenry, maybe. Too late.

  I thought I should open my eyes for one last time, very wide, to see the swelling night before it took me down. And I did, in time to see a great, reaching fork of lightning stretch soundlessly across the sky, reflecting something close to me—a bright, bright and glassy something, somehow more than one thing, bobbing just a few inches from my opening and closing and spitting mouth.

  30

  The Lambry House rises before Ellen and Pratt. The points of its wrought iron fence. The sweeping curve of its porch. The parlor windows I used to look into and dream of. The white steeple and the weathervane spearing the air.

  Ellen is looking up and so she doesn’t yet see what lies under the rosebush, the pieces of broken glass and torn hemp where Pratt left them, to hurt me. Her.

  “Wouldn’t you want to buy this, if you could?” Ellen sweeps her hand around. “I mean, look at it. It really should just sell itself. Look at how the sun’s hitting the widow’s walk.”

  Inside the arbor she notices the shards. “What’s that?”

  “Some glass I broke.” Pratt kicks the pieces away.

  A glinting necklace over a patch of dark sea. A great, wide net of glass. That’s what saved me. A fishing net, ringed with floats. I grabbed each one with my hands, one after the other, round and perfect, woven into the knotted ropes between them. I splashed and coughed and knew, somehow, something as big as this would be strong enough to cradle me.

  With all my will, I pulled a piece of hemp underneath me until my chest and stomach were over and I could feel my skirt being buoyed up, and my hair, and my feet, and then with a reach and a twist I turned on my back and could feel the web of strong line holding me and the embrace of blue glass all around me. I crawled on my back to what
I thought must be its center and looked up at the clouds just beginning to part and the stars just beginning to glisten. And I laughed, for pure joy. Because it wasn’t over. The storm hadn’t taken me. The deep hadn’t done me in. Maybe, after all, I wasn’t meant to die here. Not yet. Not me, Emma Rose Finnis. I was meant to live and breathe and float, in spite of everything. As if the spirits of the night, the far darrig, had saved me for some better plan, as no one else in my family had ever been saved. Maybe the spirits had seen in me something they’d never seen in another Finnis. They’d seen I wasn’t finished.

  I rode the water lightly, like a cork. The rain had ridden out to sea and the wind had shifted and was pushing me right along the coast. The full moon came out and showed me how fast the current was taking me along. Before long, I saw pinpricks—the first lights of Benito, darting up from the headland. The wind was still rough and the cold split my lip and my shoulder was cut, but I was riding on a good course, and if I could make it to the cove, why then the turning tide might still pull me in the rest of the way. I wound my fingers and boots through the net and hung on. My heart beat fast. Look, look how easy it was not to die! Oh, if only my Da, and my mother, and my siblings could have known. That you had to show the darkness you had will, and you had to keep yourself up as long as you could, and fight.

  I could make out the black reaching limbs of the cypress trees around the cove now. The wind was pulling me one way, and the tide another. But it’s all right, I told myself, you’re almost home. Just keep your heart calm and your eyes steady, and watch for the first rocks. The back-current, the undertow, that’ll be strong nearer the cliffs. You don’t want to be washed out to sea again. Fight for that first bit of land. Reach it on the first try.

  Ellen is taking the key from her satchel and unlocking the door.

  Pratt stops her hand. He takes the key from her, so he can lead the way into the house. He closes the door behind them and then turns toward the dead Lambry photographs.

  “Portrait of a family that had all the good fortune it could have ever wanted. And then lost it. Piece by piece. Once upon a time, this was a house that nothing had happened to. Nothing had really happened to the people in it. But then a beloved son died. Businesses started to falter. Times changed. It’s all recorded here. In the garden. In the steeple. In the very bones of this house. But there’s always an original sorrow. Albert Lambry. Only sixteen years old. Remembered by a flower, Lambry’s Ache. Why not Albert’s name on a headstone, Ellen? Why wasn’t his name remembered?”

  “Because of the old superstitions, Mrs. Fanoli said. Or maybe because some things are too awful to remember.”

  Yes. Like a father who lost his head to the sea. Whose head was later pulled out, with a fishing hook, by a Lambry dinghy.

  “Possibly. Or maybe it’s because we never name the thing that really is the culprit. The real demon in the house. I need us to test that idea, Ellen, and see. I’m going to say aloud that there is something in this house that is a curse. And I want you to say the same thing with me, please. You’re a Lambry. You have the power.”

  He draws Ellen gently closer to the stairway. But I don’t care what he’s doing or saying. Soon everything is going to be clean. Clear.

  “Something in this house is a curse. Say it, Ellen Lambry.”

  “Something in this house is a curse …”

  “Some creatures are cursed and are a curse.”

  “Some creatures are cursed and are a curse …”

  “And never bring real happiness to anyone. They’re selfish and self-centered. They bring darkness and chaos to everything they touch. They leave ruin and injury in their wake. Unless you manage to escape them. They’re purely a thing to escape. Nothing more.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Ellen says, nervously.

  Pratt presses a finger to his lips and pulls her deeper into the hall.

  I’ve never cursed anyone I touched or was close to. There’s no proof of it. My poor mother? Because she died giving birth to me? No. My father, because he died where he once stood with me and taught me to read the sea and its ships? No. Not Franny, my only friend, who I wasn’t with when she died, nor Mrs. Folde’s baby boy, and not Albert, and not all the men aboard the lifeboats, because I set foot on their ship, no. I wasn’t a curse on them, surely, not me.

  “Something that wants to take and take. To drag your soul down, and own it. For revenge. Lonely and hungry. Can’t you feel it?” He turns to Ellen, taking her arm at the bottom of the stairs. “Empty and cold and terrible. Starved. A ruin of flesh and hair. An angel of death. A bringer of ruin. That’s what she is. It is. And yet nothing. Nothing. Just a beast.”

  He thinks I wanted my Ma to leave this world bringing me into it?

  And bury my father’s severed head?

  And leave Frances to die with her baby between her legs?

  And let all the men on the Lorna drown?

  And let the tower fall on Manoel?

  And let the railing give way under Pratt, because I’d once fallen out of Quint’s arms?

  How could I be the one cursed when, so long ago, out on that tossing, moonlit night, seeing the outline of the cove and the little curve of our village that never looked so beautiful as it did to me then, hovering near it as I kicked and fought and gasped and gripped the salt-and-earth-smelling hemp and tried to steer myself and my net of glass toward its beach—how could it be me, when all I’d wanted was to live and be at peace with the world, and hold always, always, to the skimming thing life is? What a precious thing, this life, for as long as you can hold onto it, if you can. But oh, how hard the wind will fight against you, and how hard you’ll have to fight for life, kicking and struggling with your glass and rope, crying out toward the beach, shouting for anyone at all to hear.

  The stars stayed hushed. The moon kept shining. The next swell brought me closer to the rocks. The seals had all abandoned the harbor. Just one lucky push, I told myself, and then I’ll swim free and paddle toward land, and if I have to hit there on the rocks, I will. I’ll land on them and cling till dawn comes and one of the fishing skiffs launches and sees me. And then I’ll cry out, proudly, “I am here, I am here, I am me, I am Emma Rose Finnis. I’m still alive. Me.”

  “Come into the hallway now,” Pratt says.

  Ellen stares at the broken picture frames, amazed. “Everything’s been shattered!” She reaches up. “The watercolors. Alice’s paintings!”

  “It’s begun. The thing that haunts this house is getting angry. Very angry.”

  I’ve done the damage, true enough. I’ve broken the pictures. Smashed them with my fists. But to anger her. Only to bring her.

  “But why hurt the house?” Ellen touches the glass. “If the ghost wants to live here?”

  “Because it’s only a beast now. Angry it’s died. A beast doesn’t live anywhere. It—”

  “Because it’s always hated this house, though it seemed to love it.”

  Pratt turns to her.

  She’s closed her eyes. She’s a Lambry. Yes. She can see. At the end. As they all can.

  “Ellen!”

  “Finish it, please. Please finish it.”

  “Say why. This is your test. You’re a Lambry. Say why it must be finished.”

  “Because I hate this beautiful house. I hate it. All this was here, while I sat alone, while my mother died. I hate that I didn’t matter to it. I hate it. I hate it.”

  “And it’s why you’ve been helping me, all along.”

  “Let the Danes have this miserable place, all of it. I want them to tear it to pieces, I want them to gut it and rip it to shreds.”

  “Good, Ellen. Thank you. Now we’ll see. We’re almost finished. Come upstairs with me. We’re almost there.”

  “Her sea glass. Her easels. Her shells. Everything’s crushed.”

  “Yes. Hold on.”

  She will have to come, leave her grave, and Manoel’s cold bed. She’ll come, because she hates me, I know now. The spirit who was w
ith her at the end, who put a pillow over her suffering face, her lost, sad face. She’ll come because she has to stop me from taking what’s hers and breaking what’s hers and from living in a house she thinks belongs to her blood but hasn’t since that morning I rose dead from the beach, dragging my broken net behind me. She’ll come. I know it, it’s not me. It isn’t me. It can’t be. Please.

  “Listen.” Pratt holds still. “It’s happening all over the house now. The windows. The chandelier.”

  “She’s breaking things.”

  “She’s breaking everything.” They’ve reached the upstairs gallery, ducking and hunching as they come nearer the flying glass.

  I fly around the house. Where is she? Where is she? She must be here. She must have come. The windows are bursting; she must be very angry now. More anger than I’ve ever thought could live inside one body. To be abandoned by your parents. To be alone though you tried not to be. To have died, smothered. Look, how she’s turning every shrieking room gray and dark. But outside, the sun shines …

  “Can you stop her?” Ellen pleads.

  “Say it. How were you attacked in your house? What did she do to you? Close your eyes. Try to remember. Remember. How did she do it? Say it now. What did she do?”

  “She—she shoved me into the roof of my house. No light. No air. No room. I couldn’t breathe. Stop!”

  “Where did she put you? Where? Name it.”

  “In the attic. She put me in the attic. Only there was no attic. Not in that house. She shoved me where there was no air—”

  “The attic here?”

  “It’s stuffed. No room. It’s sealed—I told you—”

  “Where can I get closest to it?”

  She opens her eyes.

  “There.” She points. “By the balcony. Over the Glass Room. There’s an access grill right over it.”

  “Stay close now to me, very close.”