But Dominic hadn’t come to visit her. Why would he? He had his own life now, and Lucy hadn’t even tried to keep up with him. How long had it been since she had seen him?
The only person she still felt she knew was Anne. And Lucy was convinced, now more than ever, that Anne was a demon, a demon like Nan always said lived inside Lucy, a demon that came out in the form of a child.
A demon born from a demon house.
Lucy had a hard time figuring out how her life had gone so wrong, how she had ended up on this end, the losing end, of things. It couldn’t have been all Vito, her entire future could not have hinged solely on him. Could it have? Shouldn’t there have been a way for her to find the path home? Back to the safe home inside her head, inside her skin? Her crazies and the high-pitched hummm had been on for so long that, now that they were calm and she was clear, it all seemed so sad. All that time just gone, lost, simply “poof,” and she’s old and crazy and her family is gone and she has lost her way.
* * *
Lucy was sick of remembering. She needed to get out of this hospital and back home. Back to her real home. She thought of that childhood rhyme they used to sing at recess: “Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home, your house is on fire, and your children will burn.” It used to scare and delight them; now it made Lucy weep. But the fire … the fire … Lucy got an idea. Maybe she could have a second chance after all.
It is terribly difficult to kill yourself in a mental institution. They make sure of it. No sharp objects to cut yourself with, no loose sheets to hang yourself with, and no unmanned baths to drown yourself in. But Lucy, she thought outside the box. One option was left and was perfect. A perfect death. The absolute perfect solution in so many ways. She danced around the common room laughing and clapping on the day she conceived the “fire” part of the plan.
Fire purifies, and she was in dire need of purification. She needed to meet her Vito on the other side, and she had to wash off Gavin and Anne, burn them right off. Burn the skin they touched. The womb Anne grew in, and the breasts she sucked on. All of it.
Joan of Arc died on the pyre, and she became a saint. (Would they saint her? Maybe Saint Lucia, patron saint of putting up with horrible mothers?) Lucy remembered reading somewhere that once the initial horrific pain burned through the nerve endings, it wasn’t a bad way to die. Even the smoke inhalation could knock you out while the fire did the work. The trick was, not to survive. She also read that surviving burning was intolerable, so this was not an option.
Once she decided on the method, she just needed to figure out the implementation. She played the games, gave peeks to those who were peeking, allowed the crazy Dr. Crowley to look deep into her eyes; she could practically see him wiping the spit off his chin.
Nurse Nancy was a sympathetic one, a lonely, washed-out kind of a girl. Lucy had divulged to Nancy many secrets about how to keep her husband happy in their marriage bed, and Nancy was extremely grateful. Nancy was the one with the beautiful nails. She offered to paint Lucy’s nails once, and they had had so much fun. Lucy just let her yap on and on all the while. It had become a weekly ritual. This week while they painted nails, Lucy made sure that Nancy knew she was going home. “Nancy! Be a dear and give me the polish and the remover so when I get home I can have my darling Anne continue our tradition?”
Nancy didn’t even hesitate. She got up and got a small paper bag from the pharmaceutical repository, popped both bottles in, folded the top over, and handed the bag to Lucy. She was crying. “I will miss you, Lucy.”
“Oh, Nancy, don’t you worry, you will think of me in bed!” They both laughed.
Fire starter: check.
Matthew, an innocent yet sexually charged young man who was the night orderly in her ward, would take her out for a midnight smoke. And she’d get her matches.
In the courtyard, under the moon, Lucy smoked her cigarette, listening to Matthew whine about his insufferable mother whom he still lived with. As if he had the monopoly on insufferable mothers! Please! And then she did something out of their script. She asked for another cigarette. And she asked to be left alone to smoke it.
“I don’t know…” he stuttered as she approached him. He stood very still. She reached her hand in his pocket; she could feel he was already excited. While she wrapped her hand around the cigarettes and matches, she let her fingers find him as well.
Fire: check.
“I am getting out of here this week, Mattie,” she whispered, so close to his ear that her tongue flicked it. He shivered. “Give me this time to collect my thoughts alone, and I’ll make sure and have you visit us in Haven Port.”
He simply nodded his head, and slowly, very slowly, she removed the hand from his pocket with the pack of cigarettes and the matches.
She took her time and smoked the second cigarette. Then pocketed the matches. Matt never noticed.
* * *
Lucy removed her gown and piled it up with the bedsheets and pillows and old newspapers she’d stashed.
Her plan was to set a fire and die of smoke inhalation. She lit the pile of fabric and stood in the corner of her room and thought of her life on the river with Vito in their little fisherman’s cottage and of her real, true baby, Dominic. “Dear God,” she prayed. “Please bring me back there. I want everlasting life back there. Amen.”
She was not afraid. She had no fear. She was going home.
The smoke was thick. Her plan was working. The fabric was smoldering.
* * *
When poor Mattie came running down the hall and saw the smoke billowing out from under her door, he—who now believed he was truly in love with her—made the terrible and reckless error of opening the steel door that was containing the blaze. The fire exploded into the hallway, and everything went crazy. Crazy like Lucy. She took the whole wing down with her.
That woman could sure make an exit.
30
Dominic in the Kitchen with a Crucifix
1960
“What?” Anne asked.
“Your mother, Lucy, is dead,” said the now impatient doctor on the other end of the phone for the fifth time.
What what what what what what what? What?
“She is dead, Anne, and I need you to hear it. There are things that need to be done.”
“So what am I supposed to do about it?” In truth, Anne, the Anne that was capable, the Anne who was not trying to become her mother, knew what to do, because she had already done the whole thing once before for Nan. Her mother was the one who was incapable, who didn’t understand what she didn’t want to understand, the one who didn’t hear what she didn’t want to hear. Anne understood now what a luxury that was.
It was time for the madness to end. She needed to be stable, secure, and upright. She had to know what to do all the time in every situation. She had to become Nan.
Almost immediately she began speaking to the doctor differently. “Yes, doctor.… Yes, I see. Yes, I will make all the arrangements. Who should I call to have her body shipped? Yes … I will be here when the certificate arrives. Certified mail? Of course.”
* * *
Lucy’s funeral was an odd one, as funerals go. Anne ordered all the flowers that came to the funeral parlor out of the wake room and replaced them with roses. Lucy hated roses.
She sat quietly in a musty, stained pink velvet chair with her hands in her lap. She didn’t want to hear the stories that chair had to tell.
When Dominic walked in, he sat next to her and tried to take her hand.
“You got old,” she said.
“You got pregnant.”
“You left me.”
“You tried to kill me.”
“I was only a little girl.”
He was quiet then, and Anne noticed his eyes were puffy and swollen. He’d been crying.
Later, she’d overhear him at the house while everyone ate all the food she’d stayed up all night preparing.… Jell-O molds with walnuts, ambrosia salad, pasta, bundt cakes, and the like. Sh
e was outside the kitchen, smoking a cigarette and hiding, when she heard him pouring out his sad story to one of them damn church ladies named Beverly Bodine.
“I looked at her, Bev, and I swear … I wanted to be glad to see her, to connect with her. We shared a mother, for Christ’s sake, but her eyes were vacant. She stared right through me. And inside that look I could feel everything she feels about me. Like, I left her and how she suffered because I wasn’t there. I can’t stand it. I’ve always assumed she was crazy and strong. But now, I’m starting to believe she may have needed me. Christ, Bev.”
“You can’t take on all that guilt, Dom. It’s not fair. She’s just a demon child. Born wrong. Poor Nan. Poor Lucy. You did the only thing you could, son. You ran. Good for you, honey. Good for you.”
“But I wonder if I shouldn’t stay closer now, with the baby coming.”
“It’s sinful, is what it is. Everyone says it belongs to the devil himself.”
“Go big or go home, I guess. But either way, I owe it to my mother and my grandmother to watch over her and that baby. I should be closer to Anne. Keep an eye on her.”
Anne couldn’t listen for one more second.
She walked in, letting the kitchen door slam the way Nan used to when she was mad.
“Oh, Bev, darling. Don’t you worry. He always walks away. He isn’t like those stories people told about his father, Prince Vito the Valiant!”
Anne needed a Valium.
“Anne, I—”
“Don’t worry. My goal here is to make the both of you feel as uncomfortable as humanly possible.”
“You did good, then, little sister.”
Anne rolled her eyes and went into the front parlor.
There were a lot of tears in that room.
What are they all crying for? Is it that sad to lose the town drunk?
They are crying for themselves, not for my mother. Not for me.
Anne wouldn’t cry. Lucy was free now.
It was, Anne was convinced, far better to be dead than to be alive. Killing herself was the one thing Lucy ever did that made Anne proud or even made her feel connected to her mother. She was not going to cry over a woman who had lived a bad, sad life. Lucy was weak. And she left Anne, just like everyone else. “I should give out certificates in ‘Leaving Anne,’” she said aloud without realizing. Everyone turned and stared her way uncomfortably.
“Okay, party over. Everyone get out of my house,” she said. No one moved. “I said, grab your things, and your pity, and your envy, and your lame lives and get the fuck out of my house. Now. Or else.”
Dominic was by her side then, his hand on her arm, “Anne, Anne…”
“You get out first. And get your hands off me before I kill you. Don’t tempt me, I swear.”
“I’ll go, but I’m not going far.”
“We’ll just see about that! Get out!”
People say the house shook with her scream. They say shutters clapped open and shut and the staircase swayed. They say that those who ate the food threw up for days. They say it was the Witch House, not Anne, who ejected them. But no matter what anyone believed, Anne had her own truth.
They left. They listened, and they left. Because everyone was always leaving Anne, except her ghosts. The ghosts did not leave her, could not. She was sure of it. And not the house. Her house would not leave her. It was her cocoon, her true love, her sanity.
* * *
The next day Anne sat at the kitchen table and made a list.
How to become my grandmother, Nan:
1. Switch rooms, again.
2. Tidy hair.
3. Attend church.
4. Maintain the garden and do all chores with glee.
5. Be pragmatic.
6. Be orderly.
7. Be strict.
8. Lie about the things you don’t want to admit.
Ava sat at her feet playing peek-a-boo with a stray cat she had tricked into coming inside, but Gwyneth stood in the shadows.
31
Miss Anne in the Kitchen with the Mushrooms
1960
She’d begin with William. She had to reestablish her relationship with the church.
Besides, Anne wanted William back. She missed him, though she’d never tell him that. It was William who should be the priest at Our Lady of Sorrows. Maybe she could talk to old Father Callahan? She knew, from William’s letters, that he was interested in coming back to his old parish but that there was “no room at the inn.” Anne decided to have Father Callahan over for dinner. She called the rectory.
“Why sure, Anne, I’d be delighted. I always wanted a look-see inside Nan’s house.”
Anne bristled at “Nan’s house.” It was her house. Always her house.
“And,” the priest continued, “I am thrilled you are finding your way back into God’s graces. Thank you, I will see you on Sunday after mass. You will come to mass?”
“No, Father, I don’t think I’m ready quite yet. Maybe when you come for dinner you can hear my confession and then I can come the following Sunday?”
“Of course, Anne.”
Anne prepared roasted beet salad and pasta and sausage, and she uncorked a bottle of her Nan’s dandelion wine. The smell brought her right back to early spring. Then she went out into the gardens to visit with her ghosts—she’d been working hard bringing Nan’s garden back to life. It was amazing how one season allowed the wild right back inside.
As she surveyed her work, Gwyneth surveyed her Anne.
Hair pinned back, her apron tied neatly around her waist. She was still wearing those old boots loose and untied; the whole outfit made her look a little like a deranged prairie girl might. One hand was holding Ava’s hand, and in the other, she held a cigarette. Gwyneth sat on the garden bench.
“Anne, darling, you have to give them all up. All of Lucy’s habits. You look ridiculous in this here garden wearing Nan’s clothes and smoking.” Gwyneth slapped her knee and laughed. “And just look at your lips, you need to wipe off that bright-red Lucy lipstick. Nan would never have worn whore’s red. At least, not the Nan you knew.”
“Well,” said Anne, taking another drag of her cigarette and ignoring the leading edge of Gwen’s last words. “It’s boring being Nan. It’s funny, really: by being both of them, I can fully appreciate how they could never get along. I can’t hardly get along with myself now. How am I supposed to go back to this? How am I supposed to just give up all of that freedom?”
“Nan did it.”
“Nan had people to take care of, it was easier. She was … I don’t know! Busier!”
“Have you looked down lately, honey?”
Ava patted Anne’s belly.
“You’re going to have someone to take care of really soon. Now put down that damn toxic gas, wipe your mouth, and get some practice shoes. You got a priest coming for dinner.”
“I do indeed, Gwen. And I need a few special ingredients.”
* * *
Back at the house, Anne added a few mushrooms she’d collected to the pasta and watched out the kitchen window as Father Callahan fumbled with the side gate.
She grimaced. He was a fat man. His hair stood up at an odd angle and was combed to the side in an unsuccessful effort to hide the pale, shiny top of his head.
Anne met him at the gate and helped him with the latch.
“Why, thank you, Anne. My, how big you’ve gotten! I don’t believe I’ve seen you in what? Four or five years?” The priest lumbered past her. He wanted to see the house. She could feel his excitement.
“You really should have come to the front doors, Father. It is a grander entrance to the house.”
“Oh, no, this is fine. I have seen the front doors a thousand times. This is less formal.”
Anne didn’t like the way he said “less formal.” His voice was thick and muffled by a flabby throat. Anne visualized what the inside of his larynx must look like, all polyped and chubby, catching phlegm and food. She was disgusted.
The priest made a lot of “Hmm’s” and “Oh my, yes’s” as he entered the house and began looking around. He touched everything. Anne wondered if his hands were dirty.
“Father, would you like some wine?”
“Oh, yes, please. Do you have red?”
“I think I may have an old jug of Chianti, but I uncorked some of Nan’s famous dandelion wine. It is the most absolutely lovely thing. Would you like some?”
“That sounds delightful,” he said, coughing. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket, spit into it, and then put it back into his pocket. Anne gagged. What a foul man. This is the man who had touched her William? This man had heard her confessions? And her Nan’s confessions. This man was dirty, unholy. She left him to explore the house.
“Anne?”
“Yes?” she called from the kitchen.
“May I go upstairs? I would love to see Lucy’s—I mean, the portraits.”
Anne strode across the living room with two glasses full of light yellow wine.
“Oh, Father, I am so very sorry. Upstairs is so untidy.”
Father Callahan took his glass of wine and raised it. “Here’s to your return to the church, Anne.”
These Irish with their toasts, thought Anne, as she clinked her glass to his. “Salute, Father.”
She took a dainty sip. Father Callahan took a gulp and a thin line of yellow leaked out from the chapped, inflamed corner of his mouth.
“How about we eat? The pasta is getting cold.”
“Yes, please, sweet Anne.” He reached out to tuck a stray wisp of hair that had fallen from her bun behind her ear. “You really look so very young. You could be a child still.”
I believe you have forgotten you prefer boys, she wanted to say. But she didn’t. She had a mission. She needed to convince Father Callahan to retire.
At the table his behavior was even more inappropriate and grotesque. He drank the remainder of the wine and let food fall out of his mouth as he chewed.
“Anne, I do believe we should find you a husband. It just won’t do. God forgives many things, but people are not so forgetful. Surely there is a nice young fellow for you to marry, now that you have come to your senses.” A mushroom fell out whole onto his lap.
The Witch House of Persimmon Point Page 22
