A House for Keeping

by Matteson Wynn

  Then it dawned on me. Those weren’t rocks. They were gravestones. That was the graveyard.

  A knot formed in my stomach as I watched a blurry Sarah and Meg emerge into the clearing. They toured around it, talking. Sarah was gesturing to the headstones, and from her body language, I was pretty sure Meg was laughing.

  In a soft voice, I did a voiceover of their conversation.

  In my Sarah voice, I said, “And this, Meg, is where you’ll be buried.”

  In my Meg voice, I said, “Gee, Sarah, I can’t wait! How about over here? Over here looks great.”

  I shook my head and shuddered.

  Turning back to the attic, I followed the path, trying to keep quiet but moving much more quickly now. There was so much stuff everywhere that there was no direct route through the junk, and I had to trust that the house knew what it was doing.

  I rounded an enormous armoire and found Fuzzy sitting in the darkest corner of the attic in front of a pile of miscellaneous junk. I had to squint hard to make out a trunk, a croquet set, a shovel, and some pieces of wood stacked in a pile on the floor.

  Kneeling on the floor, I opened the trunk. My heart sank as I realized that the entire thing was crammed with papers and books. It was too dark to read in this corner, and the trunk must weigh a ton. Even if I could manage to drag it over to a window, and somehow not make a ton of noise, no way did I have time to read through everything in there.

  I looked up at the ceiling. “Please tell me it’s not in a book,” I whispered.

  I heard the house sigh around me.

  The floor jiggled, and the stack of wood fell over, disgorging an annoyed spider that scurried away. I froze. No one came to investigate the noise, so I scrambled over to take a look.

  While Fuzzy chased after the spider, I rapidly searched through the pile. It looked like a bunch of wooden planks that someone had used for building at some point. By the time I reached the bottom of the pile I was huffing in frustration. I grabbed the last plank and was considering hurling it into the dark when I realized that it had something carved into it.

  I squinted, but I couldn’t see well enough to read. I ran my fingers across the surface. That felt like…letters? And something else.

  I hopped up and headed for the nearest window. Fuzzy followed after me.

  I held up the wooden plank in the pool of light. The hole in each corner tipped me off to what I was looking at. It was a weathered sign, the type of placard I’d noticed hanging on lots of the older New England houses, proclaiming things like “Built in 1790” and “McInerny Family.”

  The light from the window was just bright enough that I could see the carvings more clearly. There were two trees. And in between them was lettering.

  “Is this it?” I asked. “Is this your name?”

  From somewhere deep in the attic, I heard a soft ding.

  “It’s perfect. I’m so very pleased to be able to call you by name, Bayley.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  I hugged the placard to me with one arm and scooped up Fuzzy with the other.

  “Bayley, I need to talk to Wil and Nor. Can you please lead me to the space over Nor’s bathroom?”

  I hurried along the path the house laid out for me until the path dead-ended.

  “Okay, can you please open a hole in the floor?”

  As a manhole-sized opening appeared, I put Fuzzy and the plank down and lay on my stomach next to the hole.

  I was looking into the tub. I could hear Nor and Wil talking in the other room.

  “Nor?” I whispered.

  Nothing.

  I was trying to figure out how I was going to reach them when Fuzzy leapt through the hole, onto the edge of the tub, and then down to the floor. While I choked back my cry of dismay, he slinked his way across the bathroom and out the door.

  A few seconds later I heard Wil falter mid-sentence, cough, and then resume speaking, albeit in a more strained tone.

  Nor said, “Hold that thought. I need to use the loo.”

  A few seconds later, Nor entered the bathroom carrying Fuzzy. She shut the door behind her.

  “Up here,” I whispered.

  Nor looked in the direction of the door to her room and whispered, “R.G. is out in the hall, and the door is open.”

  I nodded. “I need Wil.”

  Nor put Fuzzy down, flushed the toilet and ran the water for the sink, winking at me as she said, “For verisimilitude.” Then she went into the other room.

  I didn’t hear anything for a moment and then Wil said, “Now I have to go. Be right back.”

  He entered the bathroom, shut the door, and swept the room with his gaze. I waved, and he looked up.

  “Got the name. How do we do this?”

  Wil blinked a few times. Then he crossed his arms and paced back and forth a bit before asking, “You sure you want to do this?”

  “Yes. And I’m running out of time, so could you hurry it up?”

  Wil ran a hand through his hair, then rubbed his nose under his glasses. “You remember our deal, right? You’re not going to back out?”

  “Wil, this is only temporary, remember? But yeah, I remember the deal. Now give.”

  Wil whispered the instructions to me. They were actually simple, if unpleasant.

  “Great, thanks. I’ll be back when it’s over,” I said. I was about to tell him to hang onto Fuzzy for me when the edge of the hole sprouted downward, forming a ramp to the edge of the tub.

  Fuzzy leapt up onto the ramp and scurried up into the attic with me, the ramp retracting behind him as he went. I caught a last glimpse of Wil looking bewildered before the hole closed up.

  I looked at Fuzzy. “What, did you make some kind of deal with the house while I was gone?”

  Fuzzy decided this would be an excellent time to groom the fur on his chest.

  “Uh huh. We’ll talk about this later.”

  Now I needed Meg. Wil had said she’d have to change before the ceremony, so my best bet was to wait for her in her room.

  “Show me where Meg’s bathroom is,” I said to the house.

  I picked up the name plank and followed the path that the house laid out through the attic toward the front of the house.

  I looked around me until I spotted a clear surface. I put the placard down on a table and said, “I’ll be back for you later.”

  Then I returned to the spot where Meg’s bathroom should be and said, “Can I have a small peephole please?”

  Fuzzy and I peered into Meg’s bathroom. It was empty. I listened, but I didn’t hear anything coming from the other room.

  “Okay, let me in there.”

  The hole opened wider and a set of stairs grew down into the bathroom.

  “Oh man, that’s cool. Hey, uh, I’m really sorry if all this crazy architecture shifting is causing any kind of strain. This must take a lot of effort.”

  The floorboards around me let out a muted volley of deep grunts that sounded a lot like…

  “Are you giggling?”

  I heard one clear grunt.

  I looked around me in amazement. “Wait, are you having fun?”

  Grunt.

  “Well, that’s, uh, actually that’s good to hear. Glad I’m not, you know, sucking the life, er, magic out of you or anything.”

  Grunt grunt. Pause. Grunt grunt grunt grunt grunt.

  I smiled and patted the edge of the hole as I walked down the stairs, Fuzzy at my heels.

  Once I hit the floor, the stairs retracted and the hole closed up.

  The bathroom was bigger than my bedroom.

  I froze and listened. All quiet.

  I peered out into Meg’s room, then yanked my head back in, eyes watering. After the dimness of the attic, the brightness of Meg’s bedroom was nearly blinding.

  I gave my eyes a few seconds to adjust and looked again.

  The room appeared to be empty. It spanned the front of the house and was flooded with light from the windows in the front and side walls.
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br />   Unfortunately, the door to the hallway was open, and R.G. was pacing up and down the corridor.

  I jerked my head back in before he turned around and saw me.

  Well, that complicated things.

  I stayed in the bathroom, fretting, until I heard Meg coming up the back stairs.

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Meg called to someone, “and then we can finally get this over with.”

  Her footsteps stopped somewhere down the hallway.

  Meg said, “Nor, Wil, it’s time. You two go with him. He’ll take you outside to the ceremony. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  Without waiting for a response, Meg started walking in my direction. I heard a bunch of other footsteps receding toward the back of the house, so I guessed that Wil, Nor, and R.G. were following Meg’s instructions and heading outside.

  Meg entered her room and shut the door.

  I stepped out of the bathroom. “Hi, Meg.”

  She spun around, took me in, and then smiled at me. “There you are. I figured you’d turn up.”

  She didn’t look worried. In fact, she looked pleased.

  I frowned.

  “Hold her,” she said.

  Two wooden hands sprouted from the floorboards and grabbed my ankles. I struggled, but I couldn’t budge. Worse, she was standing too far away for me to touch her.

  I crossed my arms and glared at her. “Really? This again? Is there some kind of foot fetish thing that runs in our family?” I looked at my feet and sighed. “Well, last time I got mud in my shoes. I suppose I should be grateful that I don’t have splinters.”

  Meg talked as she bustled around the room, laying out a simple shift dress and a sparkly, beaded robe, and then removing her jewelry.

  She said, “The way I see it, you have two choices. You can officially cede your spot as housekeeper, and I can go on with the bonding ceremony. Or you can continue to be a stubborn pain in the ass, I can banish you from the property, and I can go on with the bonding ceremony. Your choice.”

  “Have you been watching Disney movies all morning?”

  Meg gave me a long-suffering look. “Why?”

  “Because you’re perky enough to make Cinderella cringe. And also, it looks like your fairy godmother barfed glitter all over your robe thingy.”

  She laughed. “That’s pretty funny. Doug would think that’s hilarious. I’ll have to remember to tell him you said that when this is all over.” She put her hands on her hips. “So, what’s it going to be?”

  “Before I cede anything, I want to make sure the house is going to be okay.”

  “So you, what, expect me to prove myself to you?”

  I squirmed a little. “I wouldn’t put it that way…”

  “Screw you, Finn. I don’t have to justify myself to you.”

  “Meg—”

  “No really. Screw. You. Who do you think you are? You show up out of the blue, you’re here all of like two minutes, and you decide you can sit in judgment on me, on us, on our family traditions?”

  “I’m not judging anyone—”

  “Aren’t you?”

  She stared me down until I dropped my gaze and looked at the floor.

  “I don’t get you,” she said. “You’ve got a whole future mapped out, just waiting for you. You don’t need this job. You don’t even really want to be here. But instead of doing the reasonable thing and stepping aside, you’re trying to take away my home—”

  “I am not!”

  “This isn’t just some house. It’s my home, Finn. I grew up here. You’re trying to take my home, my career—basically my entire life—away from me. And what for? Because you can?”

  I couldn’t meet her eyes. An answering ache came from the place in me that longed for the home I’d lost. My cheeks heated, and I felt ashamed that it hadn’t even occurred to me that Meg might have more than one reason for wanting to be housekeeper. I’d been painting her as a cartoon villain, all heartless greed. But the thing is, people are never simple. The map to a person’s personality isn’t a straight road to a single destination. It’s loaded with back roads, switchbacks, and dead-ends leading to all sorts of weird places. It should have dawned on me that Meg, though ambitious, could have other motivations feeding into her reasoning.

  It also hadn’t occurred to me that in her version of this story, I was the villain. I wasn’t used to thinking of myself as the bad guy, and I didn’t like the way it felt.

  I said, “Look, Meg, I’m not trying to ruin your life, I swear. I just want some time to think things through, to make sure the house is going to be okay.”

  Meg said, “Well, you’re out of time. And the house is not your responsibility. It’s mine. C’mon, Finn. Don’t force me to make you leave. I can, and I will, if necessary. But that’ll just make things…messy…politically. Make things easier on everyone and cede your position.”

  She had some reasonable points. Maybe I should just let this whole thing go. I frowned and tried to consider what she said.

  But she must’ve taken my frown as me digging my heels in, because she sighed and said, “Fine. I’ll give you a little taste of my plans, so you can put your mind at ease, and we can get on with things. Ok?”

  I nodded slowly. “Thanks, I’d appreciate that.”

  “No problem. As housekeeper, it’s my job to help my fellow Fosters.” Meg gave me a magnanimous smile, then glanced at the clock. “I’ve got to finish getting ready while we chat, though.”

  I nodded.

  As Meg began undressing, she said, “With my mom as the last housekeeper, I had no choice but to stay here. And I used that time wisely. I watched her, and I learned, and I planned. So that when the time came, it would be obvious that I’d already earned my place as housekeeper.” In her bra and underwear, she walked over to the bed and slipped the shift dress on. “And now I’m going to make this place really work for the family.” She looked around as she added, “In the past, we’ve barely tapped its potential. But I’m going to change all that. I’ll be the one to help the house really show what it can do, really give its all.”

  I said, “What about the house, Meg? What about what it wants and how it feels?”

  “It’s a house.”

  “It’s a living being.”

  “Don’t worry, Finn. The house will get what it needs to survive. It’s not like I’m going to starve it. But we all have to earn our keep, one way or another, the house included.”

  “Meg…I don’t think you’re being fair to the house—”

  “And I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. You’re new to magic, so I get why you’d be impressed with the house. And it is impressive. But in the end, it’s not a person, and you can’t expect to treat it like one.”

  Oh yes I could, but I didn’t say that out loud.

  She glanced at the clock again. “Time’s up. Last chance. Cede or leave.”

  Closer. I needed her to step closer.

  Time to play dirty.

  “Bet you’re glad your momma isn’t here for this,” I said.

  Her eyes narrowed and she said, “I wouldn’t.”

  “Wouldn’t what? Say that you haven’t changed at all since the last time I saw you, not really? That it’s all about you and what you want? When we were kids, you wanted more—more money, more clothes, more attention. More control. And it’s the same thing now.” I shook my head and gave her my best pitying look. “It’s almost a mercy your mom’s not here. You’d be breaking her heart.”

  I saw it coming. I saw her take two steps forward and raise her arm to slap me. I braced and got ready to grab her.

  But she stopped. She lowered her arm slowly. And she smiled.

  I flinched.

  And she was still just out of reach.

  “Door number two it is, then. And Finn, just so you know, for that last remark, I’m making your banishment permanent. House—”

  Fuzzy streaked into the room, growling like he was four times his actual size. He
dashed behind Meg and launched himself at the back her legs, claws out.

  “Ow!” Meg yelled as she staggered forward.

  I reached out and grabbed one of her flailing arms. It was easy to pull her all the way off balance because she was already halfway there.

  She fell to ground, and I bent my knees to follow her down, wrenching my ankle in the process.

  As we fell, I called, “Splinters.”

  Sharp splinters of wood sprouted from the floor and as Meg hit her knees, I said, “Sorry about this,” and slammed both our arms onto the splinters.

  Meg yelped and tried to pry her arm from mine. But I gritted my teeth and held on.

  Blood from both our arms mixed and smeared on the floor.

  In a rush, I said, “Bayley, I, Finn of the Fosters, petition you to claim the housekeeper bond. Release Meg—”

  Meg talked over me, saying, “What? What are you doing? Let me go—” as she struggled harder to pull free of my grip. When I held on and kept talking, she rained punches at me with her free arm, landing a solid blow on my mouth.

  But I didn’t stop. I ignored her and the blood dripping from my lip and kept going with the words Wil had taught me.

  “—Bayley, with your permission, I freely accept the bond. As I will it, so will it be.”

  Meg and I both froze. I don’t know if she felt anything. I felt tingly and lightheaded, but that might have been because she’d been beating on me.

  She said to me, “What did you do?”

  I looked at the floor and said, “Release me.”

  The wooden hands released my ankles and disappeared back into the floor.

  Meg looked horrified. “No,” she said.

  “House remove Meg from the property—”

  “You can’t do this! House, stop her. House, silence her. House!”

  “—and don’t let her reenter until I say so. Do it now.”

  From the bathroom I heard a loud, cheery ding. Then, one of the windows opened. Vines of ivy came snaking through the window, twined around Meg until she was wrapped up like a mummy, and whisked her outside. Though muffled, she continued yelling all the way out the window.