Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  And no answer but the birds and the traffic down on Sixteenth Avenue, the waking-up sounds, the people-going-on-about-their-business sounds, as if nothing at all has changed but the day of the week, the numbers on a calendar. Chance closes her eyes, and at least then there’s only the noise, only the hint of light filtered through her eyelids. And maybe that’s the trick, she thinks, to make a night to hide inside, a night that doesn’t have to stop until the emptiness inside her is gone and she can stand the thought of another sunrise, the thought of routine.

  So Chance sits on the hood, green eyes closed and feeling the unwelcome July sun across her face, the gentler heat rising from the Impala’s engine block through her jeans, and she imagines all the ways to fashion a night, how to sew indigo skies and not even any stars or the moon unless she wants them there, unless she cuts holes for them to shine through, obsidian skies if that’s what it takes. A night to wrap around her to match the night coiled beneath her skin, eating her alive.

  Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Chance, her grandfather’s voice somewhere right behind her, ghostvoice from the passenger seat of the Impala, and Chance scrambles off the hood, all thoughts of retreat and nocturnal architecture gone in that instant of impossible surprise. But there’s no one and nothing standing by the car but her, and Chance feels foolish and ashamed and angry all at once, meaner emotions swimming against her grief, silverbright flotsam to snag her attention for an instant before they drift away and there’s nothing but the sadness again. So not her grandfather’s voice at all, only her memory of her grandfather’s voice, some part of herself so sick of the loss and the guilt and the deadness inside speaking in a voice that maybe she’ll pay attention to, maybe, and Chance leans forward, both palms open on the stillwarm hood of the Chevy, and she’s crying again before she can stop the tears, can’t stop what she doesn’t see coming. And nothing to do but stand there, little drops of water and salt wringing themselves from her eyes to splash across the rustorange car.

  Her great-grandfather built this house, something fine a hundred years ago and it’s not like it hasn’t been kept up, not like it’s been allowed to sink into ruin and neglect the way so many its age have, and this is the house where Chance has lived since she was five years old. Her great-grandfather a schoolteacher who married a schoolteacher, and he built his new bride this modest shelter of gingerbread shingles and walls that have never been painted any color but the same sensible white, sandstone block and mortar chimneys and a lightning rod fixed to one high cornice where gable meets sky, pointing like a cast-iron finger towards heaven. And way up high, the window into what was the attic long before it became Chance’s bedroom.

  She climbs the stone steps slow, up to the big front porch that stretches halfway around the house. And there’s the Boston fern and its shattered red clay pot, soil strewn across the whitewashed porch boards and the fronds already going brown. Her grandfather was carrying the fern out to the porch, a whole morning spent repotting the root-bound plant, and now it marks the spot where he was standing when his heart stopped beating for the last time. No one’s picked it up, swept away the dirt and broken pottery shards, but there are footprints in the dry black soil, footprints of paramedics and policemen, and in places the dirt is ground deeply into the wood, pressed flat where Joe Matthews lay two whole hours before Chance came home and found the body already cold and stiff.

  She kicks the wad of wilting fern and dirt, and for a second it’s airborne, then skitters and rolls across the porch, trailing rootsy bits of itself as it goes, finally coming to rest against another, unbroken pot, a huge philodendron to shade the dying fern from the morning sun. And she doesn’t feel any better, worse maybe, because the fern was something her grandfather cared about. She looks quickly away from it, one hand fast into a pocket of her jeans for her keys and in a moment the front door swings open on the foyer, the mustycool, familiar smell of the house beyond spilling out around her.

  She crosses the threshold, shoescuffed strip of varnished pine to mark her reluctant steps, right foot across, left foot next, and she’s passed from the indecent brightness of morning into the shadows and leftover scraps of night waiting inside; a house to anyone passing by, but Chance knows that it’s become something more: a dim and whispering box to hold all the memories of her life, a memorial. Frame for a thousand reminders she doesn’t need because she couldn’t forget if she tried, wouldn’t if she could. And she just wants it to be a plain old house again.

  She slowly pulls the front door shut behind her and sits on the floor, still cool and the door at her back now, whole world at her back, and she squints down the long hall running past the stairs all the way back to the kitchen and the room where her grandfather kept all his cardboard boxes and wooden crates of rocks, the cloth and plastic bags of fossils and minerals that have never been opened or cleaned or labeled. Two rooms and between them a gaudy, narrow rectangle of daylight, day sneaking in through the lead-glass window set into the back door.

  And it all washes back over her again, the indisputable reality of it, truth that smells like carnations and a shovelful of red cemetery dirt—that they are dead, gone, all of them, and she’s as alone at twenty-three as someone who has outlived an entire lifetime of family and friends and lovers. An old, old woman in such young skin, and the truth and her mind push each other away, opposing magnetic poles, and Chance shuts her eyes again, and in a moment the air has stopped smelling like funerals and there’s nothing but the velvetsoft odor of dust and the ghost of her grandfather’s pipe.

  The first funeral when her parents died in a car wreck and Chance was left alive, backseat survivor bruised black and purple and her left arm broken in two different places, but still plenty alive enough to watch their caskets being lowered into the ground, to stand between her grandparents while a minister read things she didn’t understand from the Bible, things she didn’t want to understand, only wanting to go home, and what she remembers most is the car ride back to her grandparents’ house, listening quietly while they argued because her mother and father weren’t Christians, but there had been a minister, anyway.

  “I told them we didn’t want it,” her grandmother kept saying. “I told them that Henry and Carol said they didn’t want it, and you know damn well that they didn’t, you know how many times they said they didn’t.”

  “Mrs. Sawyer wanted it,” her grandfather said, sounding as tired as Chance, and her grandmother blew her nose loud into her handkerchief, made an angry sound through her teeth, and “It wasn’t Mrs. Sawyer’s funeral, Joe,” she said. Her grandfather didn’t reply, and Chance’s arm hurt, but she was too tired to cry anymore, watched the houses and trees and fireplugs slipping past instead.

  So she went to live with them in their big house on the mountain above the city, and six weeks later a doctor cut the plaster cast off her arm, bones healed and bruises fading, and no one much seemed to notice all the other ways she had been hurt. In the beginning, whenever her grandmother visited her parents’ graves, Chance was always with her, flowerbright bouquets and her last name carved deep in granite like a spelling lesson. Sometimes she asked questions, and “Your mom and dad are asleep,” her grandmother would reply, or “You’ll understand when you’re a little older,” but never sounding as if she believed what she was saying.

  Sometimes her grandmother would wander among the other tombstones, reading the other names aloud or to herself, and Chance would lie down on the green cemetery grass, her ear pressed against the earth, listening for her father’s snore, the way her mother sometimes talked in her sleep. But never anything, and finally her grandmother caught her, made her promise never to do it again.

  “That’s disrespectful, lying on someone’s grave like that,” and then she was crying too hard to explain what she meant.

  And one night, when Chance was six and had a cold so bad she’d already missed a week of school, she woke up and her mother was sitting in the chair beside her bedroom window, sitting very still and watc
hing her, the January moonlight shining through her like she was made of glass. Her eyes like pearls, and Chance stared back at her, fevery, and her throat too raw to say anything, wishing she had a drink of water or a Grapico, but afraid her mother might disappear if she moved. She finally drifted back to sleep, and when she woke again it was morning and her mother was gone, nothing in the chair but winterpale sunlight on the cover of McElligot’s Pool by Dr. Seuss. She told her grandmother, who said it had been a dream, only a dream because of the fever, said that people with bad fevers sometimes dreamed very strange things, but she sat up with Chance the next night, and the next, sat there in the chair where her mother had sat, every night until she was well again. Standing guard or waiting, and Chance never asked which.

  And then, fifteen years old when her grandmother hung herself from the lowest limb of a water oak behind the house, coarse knots tied around strong wood and her frail neck and she stood on a ladder to reach, stepped off to fall. A long night of thunder and lightning, and Chance, teenage girl caught between two storms, the one raging outside and the one trapped inside the house, laid awake listening to the raindrops shattering themselves against the roof and windows. Listening to her grandparents downstairs, up later than usual and arguing, angry, bitter words passing between them, thrown like china cups and saucers. She’d seen it coming, like the storm clouds building themselves anvil-tall across the western horizon just before dark. Always so hot in her attic room by August, nothing but an old electric desk fan, and that night Chance hadn’t bothered to turn down the covers, had tried to read for an hour or so. But the storm and their voices and the sweat that dripped from her face to splotch the pages all too distracting, and finally she’d given up and the secondhand paperback copy of Dandelion Wine folded open to Chapter Five on the floor, discarded for the night, while she tried to understand what they were fighting about. A word here, half a sentence there, muffled puzzle rising up through the floorboards.

  “. . . but I’m not the one trying to pretend it never even happened, now am I?”

  “I don’t know what you want from me, Esther.”

  “Just stop treating me like I’m crazy so you don’t have to think about it anymore,” and a door slamming very hard somewhere in the house then, before the last word, the very last word, and maybe she didn’t even hear that part at all, or heard it wrong; the sounds too faint, housesifted, her grandmother sobbing, and one of them (Chance was never sure which, if either) said, “Dicranurus,” one word of Latin or Greek that meant nothing to her, repeated again and again like a litany or invocation, but not that unusual to hear Latin in the house, her grandfather still teaching geology at the university, her grandmother a retired paleontologist, so the word made strange only by circumstance, by context, that she was hearing it then. She found a pencil on her desk, schoolyellow No. 2 Ticonderoga nub, and scribbled a phonetic spelling inside the back cover of Dandelion Wine before she lay back down.

  And then she fell asleep and dreamed that the thunder was something more than simple sound, something dark and brooding far above the world, and the rain fell from it in hissing, acid streaks the color of old motor oil, greasy rain to steam on the grass and trees, to clot in the rain spouts and mud holes. The sound of her grandfather’s cries getting through faint at first, old man’s voice basketwoven between the grayblack rain, between the deafening movements of the thing in the sky. Chance would not remember waking up, coming awake by syrupslow degrees, and then she was standing in her underwear and a mostly white Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt on the back porch, and this rain was cold and blacker than in her dream. Her grandfather was hanging onto a ladder, halfway up a ladder and wrestling desperately with something dangling from a limb of the big oak tree.

  “Grandpa!” Chance yelled, shouting to be heard above the crash and wail of the thunderstorm. “Help me, Chance,” and her grandfather not looking away from the limp thing in the tree. “Jesus Christ, help me get her down.” And by then Chance could see, her mind not yet ready to believe what she was seeing, but that didn’t make it any less so. The thing in the tree moved, turning in the wind or maybe from the force of her grandfather sawing at the rope with a kitchen knife. Chance stepped towards the ladder, bare feet in mud and wet grass and part of her still wandering in the nightmare, not wanting the oily rain to touch her, not wanting to look up. But the rope broke, snapped like a firecracker, and her grandmother’s body fell lifeless to the ground.

  A few hours after her grandmother’s funeral and the house filled with aunts and uncles and cousins, people Chance didn’t really know and didn’t want to see, at least no ministers this time, but everyone bringing food like your grandmother dying made you want to fucking eat. The house stinking of casseroles and hams and butter beans, apple pies and chocolate cake, and Joe Matthews drunk in the front parlor, drinking glass after glass of Jack Daniel’s whiskey like it was water, water to make him forget. Chance was hiding in the library, and she could hear the women pretending to be busy in the kitchen, her Great-uncle William telling her grandfather, “That ain’t gonna help, Joe. You’re just gonna make yourself sick, that’s all. You need to eat something. Let me have Patsy get you some coffee and something to eat.”

  Chance wanting to defend her grandfather, but not about to leave the library, dustysafe sanctuary of shelves and glass cases and the musty smell of all the books, the door locked from the inside against birdnervous aunts who thought maybe a few slabs of smoked ham and a spoonful of mashed potatoes would make anything better, would make anything right again. Chance was sitting at the big, walnut-burl table her grandparents had always used for looking over their topographic and geologic maps, their stratigraphic sections, big, unpolished chunks of powderwhite Sylacauga marble at each corner for paperweights, green felt glued to the bottom of the rocks so they wouldn’t scratch the wood; this place for finding points of reference, orientation, place for protractors and slide-rule calculations, place for not being lost—and that’s where she found the book, Handwörterbuch der Naturwissenshaften, 1933, and Chance’s eyes moving absently down a yellowed page, detailed engravings of trilobites, and they had always been her favorite fossils, her grandmother’s specialty. There were hundreds or thousands of the petrified arthropods tucked away in cabinets and drawers throughout the house, most smaller than a thumbnail, but a few giants over a foot long. And so nothing out of the ordinary about this page, German and Latin, Devonian trilobites of the subfamily Miraspidinae, illustrations of fossils from Africa and Oklahoma, and way down at the bottom of the page Chance found the word, the name she’d scribbled in the back of Dandelion Wine three nights before, Dicranurus, and a circle drawn around four of the illustrations in faded red pencil, four views of the trilobite and a red circle like a fairy charm to contain the drawings inside. Dicranurus monstrosus, the specimen figured from Oulmes, Morocco, coiled like a tiny gargoyle on the page; spines so long they might as well be tentacles and the twin projections that spiraled like ram’s horns from its head. A chill along her arms, then the back of her neck like a gust of cold air and one finger cautiously crossing the red circle, another half second and Chance would have touched the image of the creature itself, but someone started hammering at the door. “Chance? Are you in there, honey? Chance? You should come out and eat something.”

  And she closed the book, slammed it shut and put it away, had long ago learned the exact position of every book in the library so it wasn’t hard to find the empty place where it belonged. “I’m coming,” she called to the voice behind the door. “I’ll be out in a moment,” and always meaning to come back to the book later, always meaning to ask her grandfather about the ugly little trilobite held within the red circle, but in time she forgot it, and forgot the dream of a night sky that leaked steaming, oilslick tears.

  Three months before her grandfather’s heart attack, the violent last gasps of spring on the scalding heels of summer, and the day she broke up with Deacon there were tornadoes, black and twisting clouds touching down all the
way from Arkansas to Georgia. Civil defense sirens going off like doomsday, and she gave him the news outside the cruddy, little bar where he spent so much of his time. The place where he sat and drank himself stupid and numb so he didn’t have to face the world. All the weeks it had taken her to find the nerve, the careful, padded words, to end something that was already over; Deacon listened, and when she was finished he shrugged his bony shoulders, ran the fingers of one hand through his hair and looked up at the angry sky.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Okay, whatever,” so calm, so fucking resigned, and she wanted to hit him then, all his drunkard’s bullshit and even the sleeping around on her and that was the first time she’d ever wanted to hit him.

  “Jesus, is that all you have to say to me? Three goddamn years and that’s all you can think of to say to me?” And he just smiled a little, then, stubbly bum’s smile for her, and he rubbed hard at his chin.

  “What do you want me to say, Chance? You know I’m not going to change your mind, and I don’t feel like arguing with you right now,” and so she left him standing there, turned around and stalked quickly, determinedly, away; most of the things she’d meant to say left unspoken, the disbelief at what he’d done with Elise and the sloppy, half-assed way he’d tried to lie about it, the straw that broke the camel’s back. All the soursharp anger still bottled up hot behind her eyes, and she walked all the way home through the siren wail and thunder- and lightning-scented wind.

  And hours later, almost dark and the thunderstorms had blown themselves away east, left the city wet and gray, and Chance was trying to concentrate on a stack of notes for her thesis, envelope of black-and-white photographs of the flat and dimpled skulls of primitive amphibians and fish with fingers, anything but Deacon Silvey and her screwed-up life, when the phone rang and it was Elise. A bad connection from the weather and that brittle, hesitant sound in her voice that said she’d been crying and might start again at the drop of a hat.