He had expected a comfort zone to eventually set in as he became familiar with the place, but when he pulled open the screen door and stepped across the threshold, he still felt the formality of borrowed space. There were protocols of age and perspective here he could never meet. The dusty bric-a-brac and worn fabrics were helplessly mute with history, the high ceilings swam with ghostly echoes, and the totem objects enshrined in cabinets or frames remained arcane mysteries to him. Worst of all, the eyes of the elders who lived here grew more distant instead of closer with each visit he paid. They were not sympathetic judges. They were an increasingly disinterested panel of jurors consigning him vote by vote to the irrelevant world of external things.
Except for today.
Today the gazes bore into him like bloodied iron pikes, stabbing again and again but failing to hold. Red-rimmed eyes, great gluey eyes, muzzy orbs wide with fear or desperation—not just on one person but on all of them. So he understood that whatever had agitated the table at yesterday's meal had progressed to this. Or deteriorated. And in part, because of the eyes, he glimpsed the vague travesties of Ariel's Passover without really seeing them, recognizing that something had changed but blind to the details. He saw that everyone looked older, more defeated by life than he had seen them before, but that was just a thing you noticed suddenly. And they kept moving, like so many ravaged salmon dying in the shallows of their final migration; this too confused the impression.
It was almost comical, their restless stirring in slow motion from room to room. He lingered longer than he normally would have in order to observe it, trying to start a conversation but getting only barely civil responses. How odd. It aroused all those counseling instincts that made him comfortable with distraught students sitting across a desk from him. Only, no one wanted to sit near him now. From parlor to dining room to kitchen they turned aside, slowly dying salmon casting raw-eyed pleas before wriggling away.
"What's going on?" he plied Dana when she came up from the cellars with a clothes basket only half full.
"Laundry," she said.
She looked haggard and pained, he thought. He followed her outside where she had strung a plastic clothesline from the stanchion at one end of the porch to a sugar maple thirty feet away.
"That's going to sag," he said about the clothesline.
"I couldn't fling the rope up through the first branch."
"Sounds like a job for Paavo."
She made a neutral sound, rubbed her fingers. He was startled by the knobbiness of her knuckles. This wasn't temporary swelling; it was the chronic deformity of arthritic hands. How had he not noticed before? That business with pressing his fingertips to hers the other day in the field—her hands had been smooth then. But, of course, he must be mistaken about that.
"Want me to clean out the dryer?" he said.
She looked at him with a glint of gratitude. "I couldn't ask you to do that."
"You aren't asking. I'm offering. Dana . . . what's going on?"
"You can't see?"
"See? Why don't you just say it? Then I'll know if it's what I see."
Her slate blue eyes were already receding, like the others. Doomed people looked that way. People on an ice floe drifting away from the mainland looked that way.
"There's nothing you can do for us," she said. "And your father . . . will be all right, I think."
"You think?"
She shook her head. "He'll be all right. I shouldn't have said it that way. I meant that you shouldn't interfere. There isn't any problem for you if you don't interfere."
"Listen, if I thought there was any danger to my father here, I'd be on it like—you'll pardon the expression—a fly on horseshit. So what exactly are you talking about? Why is everyone dragging around like mourners? Did someone die in that barn fire and Ariel is trying to hide it?"
But she wouldn't confirm, wouldn't deny. He played Twenty Questions. Got no satisfaction. It wasn't about the two of them or the photo or the camera, she maintained.
"You did drop that picture in the soup though?" he pressed her. "I mean, that wasn't an accident?"
She fussed wearily with the wet clothes going over the plastic clothesline, as if he had made a statement. Maybe it had been an accident, he thought, staring at her deformed hands. She could be embarrassed about her arthritis.
He went straight to his father's room then and recited the litany of contact, looking for clues to the subtext of his old man's life: "How are you, guy?" "Lonely." "That's because you sit in here all day." "Says you." "Well, don't you?" "I don't remember." Sometimes it was, "I don't care." But Martin Bryce never spoke of events or the people around him. When he was stimulated enough, he would launch his own mantra:
"What is this place?"
"What time is it?"
"Beth is dead, isn't she?"
When she was alive, his father had always referred to her as "your mother." But increasingly now, as if it hurt to remove her even that far, it was just "Beth."
"You need a shave, old man," Denny said.
"No."
"I promise I won't cut you this time." His father remembered that. Good sign.
"Use the electric shaver."
"Can't get any whiskers that way. You're a lumpy old man. Getting rid of your whiskers is like trying to shave parsley off mashed potatoes."
"Says you."
Did it matter if he shaved? Did it matter if he wore a cheap flannel shirt buttoned to the neck on a muggy day? He wasn't breaking a sweat. Denny's mother had sent away for that shirt—some catalogue filled with deception and offering hope to a woman still vital but without the energy to argue her husband into going shopping.
Denny asked half a dozen questions, knowing his father would tolerate no more than that. He tried to sculpt them so that they could not be responded to with clichés, hoping that something of the undercurrent in New Eden would emerge from the answers. His father would begin inventing things if the demand on his memory grew too great. He would simply snip out years of intervening reality to find some parallel that pleased him, something that fit comfortably with the continuum of the life he had known when his wife was alive. Thus the food was fine at New Eden for Martin, though he could do with another helping of Beth's apple brown Betty; and the people were fine, though he wished they wouldn't honk their car horns at all hours of the night; and he was getting along with everyone just fine—no arguments—except that he wanted to be left alone. Alone. He had complained about being alone when Denny had entered. Meaning that no matter who else was around, without Denny he would always be alone. His boy, the only living being who was still admitted to the estates of shared time and memory. When had his father ever trusted anyone this much? It hurt Denny to the core to be trusted like that. He wasn't worthy of it.
And that was funny, because he had spent most of his life trying to secure just that demonstration of paternal love and endorsement. And now it was his by default, by derangement. No, not derangement. His father would simply die if Denny let him. He was alive because Denny demanded it. Because Denny couldn't let him go. Didn't want to ever, ever, ever have to look back and know that he had just let him go.
So why wasn't he doing something about all this weird stuff going on here? He should at least be looking for the right questions, if not the answers. Dana Novicki's reticence was proof positive that there was something going on. Could he trust her when she said his father would be all right if he didn't interfere?
"I'm not trying to interfere," he said, face-to-face with Ariel later on. He had asked for a few minutes with her through Molly (pallid, flabby Molly who seemed to have succumbed to gravity overnight) and was struck at how composed Ariel was and how nervous Molly became before she left them alone in the sewing room. "Believe me, the last thing I want to do is to interfere with something that attracted me in the first place because . . . because it seemed to be working." He lost track of where he was going. He was a lousy performer, and he should not have rehearsed that little preamble abou
t not interfering.
"And now it isn't?" Ariel helped him crisply.
"Isn't . . . ?"
"Working."
"I don't know if it is. I mean, if I said that, I meant I'm just a little worried about my father."
"Then it's your father who isn't working?"
"No. No, I don't mean my old man. Something is going on here, and I don't know what it is. I think it's personal between you and . . . and your circle, so I really don't want to know. But if it's threatening to my father—and frankly, if everyone is at each other's throats, then it's bound to affect him sooner or later—then I'm worried. You can understand that."
"How is it threatening to your father, Mr. Bryce?"
"Well, for one thing, I can't get hold of him, and he can't get hold of me."
"Ah, the phone. What else?"
"I don't know what else. It's just the atmosphere. My first impression of this place was that it was so informal that I thought it was just what my father needed. A real home—natural. I guess this is the downside of that. But there are limits—" She looked at him so steadily that he forbore raising the possibility of taking his father out of New Eden.
"I'll remind you of all my reservations, Mr. Bryce. You wouldn't listen. Even after I made it clear to you how unorthodox we were, you wanted your father to come here. You implied that if I didn't let you in, you might raise questions with the authorities. Specifically, I believe you mentioned taxes and state subsidies and certification. I compromised rather than deal with that, because no one wants to do back flips for nearsighted inspectors. As you say, we're informal here—"
"I pay you more than the going rate."
"Yes, you do. Your choice again. All your choices. And when I told you I wouldn't accept anyone who didn't agree to stay here for life, you accepted that too."
There it was. So, what if he took his father out? The two of them would be right back where they had started. No place to go that wasn't a warehouse for the dying, and maybe a waiting list besides. The papers were full of horror stories of neglect, abuse and incompetence at one facility after another. At least his father wasn't getting worse here. In fact, what had he personally suffered? "I'm not trying to interfere . . ." Denny murmured, lifting his eyes above her, absorbing the countdown of her stare.
"I'll tell you what, Mr. Bryce. I can't ask Paavo to do it, but if you want to manage the work yourself, you may put a phone in your father's room. The phone jacks are quite old, so you'll have to fuss with whatever they do to make them fit the new phones."
"I can put in new jacks."
"Good. Then you'll be able to check on your father whenever you're worried."
He nodded. "That would help," he said. "I'll pay part of your phone bill."
She waved it off. "If it gets to be an expense, I'll let you know."
He went looking for a hardware store and found a Menards twelve miles away sharing a dying strip mall with Lilliputian boutiques and a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Back with a crimp tool, hardware and a new phone, he kneeled at the baseboard of his father's room.
"You don't have to do this, son," the old man said, and Denny knew he was pleased. Even though his father would probably never use it, maybe not even pick it up if it rang. He was registering the attention, the fuss over him by the flesh of his flesh.
And Denny in turn prolonged the dependency of father on son. "It's a button phone, Dad. Big oversize buttons, and they light up as soon as you lift the receiver. Just push the numbers you want. Okay? It's easier than a rotary dial. And I'm writing my phone number right here at the base in big numbers. See?"
He could have set the speed dial so his father only had to push one button, but he couldn't count on him remembering that or even following instructions if they were written down. So he was betting on habit. His father would understand that it was a phone number written at the base, and might even recognize whose it was or at least figure that it had to be his son's. It was better than nothing, because this was his dad, and yeah, it mattered whether he was shaved or had the right shirt on. Because if he stopped preparing for life each day, then he was that much closer to becoming part of the rapacious mystery that had devoured all but the final two of the Bryce dynasty, and Denny wasn't ready to let him go, or to go it alone to extinction. Not by a long shot. So he shaved him and clipped his nails, which were so brittle that they puffed powder into the air, and helped him into a nice cream-colored pastel long-sleeve of light cotton that Beth Bryce had bought at Target. "Didn't cut you, did I, old man?" he said, even though he had nicked a tiny wen in the crease around his mouth. And then he let the old man lie down, all spruced up with nowhere to go, and kissed him on the forehead and said good-bye.
He hadn't forgotten the crows though. So he spent the next half hour cleaning out the dryer drum with a pair of gloves on and putting the rank, feathered travesties with their blue-lidded eyes into a plastic garbage bag. The two dark passages on the far end of the laundry room yawned like railroad tunnels, and he had the feeling that something kinetic was building there, as if a huge engine was gathering power in the blackness. A long, mournful whistle from the right-of-way across the road cued into his thoughts, and he wondered just what way station this farmhouse was in the destiny of its earthly inhabitants.
Chapter 23
Amber sat in the middle of her bed, rocking. The huge oak corner posts were rooted to the floor, but the sideboards creaked: her nocturnal lullaby, sung to herself whenever she felt insecure. Her thoughts were flying and her heart was pounding from bad dreams, but gradually both slowed to match the rhythm and the sound she was making. As anxiety subsided, she stopped rocking, slumped, slept. Three times during the night she sat up and resumed her catharsis, and three times it worked its magic and she went back to sleep. The midmorning sun found her kneeling in the middle of the mattress, bowed over the pillow in her lap.
Why hadn't anyone called her?
She should have known then that something was wrong. Sometimes if her mother thought she had been restless, she let her sleep. Though even then she would hear the house murmuring drowsily and the smell of bacon and toast might drift under her door. Other doors would click shut, and Ruta's shrill complaints would start. Someone might laugh, toilets would flush, faucets would run, or the Philco radio in the parlor would drone with news. But today, with the sun through the slats already striping the far wall, there was dead silence.
And no Aarfie.
The only time that the house stayed quiet like this was when her mother wanted to surprise her, like on Christmas or her birthday. So now she tasted a vague excitement, because the only thing she could think of was that her mother had painted Aarfie back. That's why everyone was being so quiet. Not because they were scared and hunkered down in their rooms, like she had thought at first, but because they were all waiting for her to be surprised when she saw Aarfie again.
Only, why didn't he bark?
So then she thought it probably wasn't Aarfie, and her spirits fell a little. Still, you couldn't be sure he wasn't coming back. The painting had to dry. So she stayed kneeling in the middle of the mattress, not wanting to end hope. But the house was so quiet.
Exhaustion, in fact, had stolen a scene from Amber just after dawn when the household had begun to stir. The earliest murmurs—Paavo's, Helen's, and Beverly's self-conscious voices—hadn't penetrated her sleep. The three of them had been sitting in the parlor, not wanting to awaken anyone else, when suddenly a fourth person had appeared and demanded: "Who are you?"
"Who are we?" Helen had said. "Are you walking in your sleep?"
And then there had been a long pause. And then Beverly, trembling and with awe, had said: "It's not her. It's not her."
And that left the hush Amber awakened to later—the hush of retreat and stifled whispers and abject fear. For two hours no one had stirred except that fourth person, who wandered the house and yard that were so changed from the mid 60s when she had last seen them. It was her tread that awakened the sleeper,
as she came down the familiar hall to the familiar room and without knocking opened the bedroom door.
You couldn't tell which one of them screamed first. Twin screams. Twin faces. Twin Ambers.
Amber One stood on the mattress; Amber Two took a step backward but clung to the door handle as if welded there by an electric current. In the far reaches of the house everyone else knew what they were discovering. Welcome to your new pet, Amber One. Ditto, Amber Two. Much better than a toy collie, eh? Your own Barbie doll come to life. But there are going to be some problems. Who gets to wear what, sleep where? And who gets Ken? You get the picture, don't you, girls? You are sisters, but you've still only got one life—
Ariel could have told them of each other's existence, of course. Told one or both of them. But it was an experiment, after all, and the politics of the thing were yet to be determined. A little leverage for the creator, let's say. No telling exactly how it was going to go. Let them sort it out, discover enmity, fear. Because they didn't know yet if they could coexist. And Ariel was betting they could not.
She had gotten the idea with Marjorie's doppelganger. A copy of a copy. Not like painting a natural-born person, who, if they were still naturally alive, would then cease to exist. No, she could make them proliferate like rabbits, all alive at the same time. What fun! Of course, there was a certain moral inertia that had to be dealt with. The mere sanctity of life for one; divine providence for another. But why should she be bound by purely mortal concepts? Creation was the very antithesis of rules. She would not be bound by the tiny voice of a fleeting moment of time out of eternity. That first morning after her intended suicide, lying on the Chesterfield, hearing Amber's little-girl voice call out "Mother?" after so many decades—that was one such tiny voice. You couldn't get too sentimental about life when your power effectively meant the end of death. No one could understand this who had not performed the magic by their own hand. Holy or hell-spawned magic, it didn't matter. The power was the same.
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