Rustling, from the vent. The faintest hint. Or had it come from the hallway?
“Grandma, what happened?”
“An accident, Miriam. Like I said. Your goddamn grandfather . . . ”
“You can’t—” Martin started, and Roz rode him down.
“Your goddamn grandfather wouldn’t put them in homes. Either one. ‘Your mother’s your mother.’ ” When she said that, she rumbled, and sounded just like grandpa. “‘She’s no trouble. And as for my mother . . . it’d kill her.’
“But having them here, kids . . . it was killing us. Poisoning every single day. Wrecking every relationship we had, even with each other.”
Grandma looked up from her knees and straight at us. “Anyway,” she said. “We had a home care service. A private nurse. Mrs. Gertzen. She came one night a week, and a couple weekends a year when we just couldn’t take it and had to get away. When we wanted to go, we called Mrs. Gertzen, left the dates, and she came and took care of both our mothers while we were gone. Well, the last time . . . when they died . . . your grandfather called her, same as always. Sophie liked Mrs. Gertzen, was probably nicer to her than anyone else, most of the time. Grandpa left instructions, and we headed off to the Delaware shore for five days. But Mrs. Gertzen had a heart attack that first afternoon, and never even made it to the house. And no one else on Earth had any idea that my mother and Sophie were up here.”
“Oh my God,” I heard myself whisper, as the vent above me rasped pathetically. For the first time in what seemed hours, I became aware of the clock, tuk-ing away. I was imagining being trapped in this bed, hearing that sound. The metered pulse of the living world, just downstairs, plainly audible. And—for my great-grandmother and Mrs. Gold—utterly out of reach.
When I looked at my grandmother again, I was amazed to find tears leaking out of her eyes. She made no move to wipe them. “It must have been worse for Sophie,” she half-whispered.
My mouth fell open. Martin had gone completely still as well as silent.
“I mean, I doubt my mother even knew what was happening. She probably prattled all the way to the end. If there is an Angel of Death, I bet she offered him a Berger cookie.”
“You’re . . . ” nicer than I thought, I was going to say, but that wasn’t quite right. Different than I thought.
“But Sophie. Can you imagine how horrible? How infuriating? To realize—she must have known by dinner time—that no one was coming? She couldn’t make it downstairs. We’d had to carry her to the bathroom, the last few weeks. All she’d done that past month was light candles and read her Zohar and mutter to herself. I’m sure she knew she’d never make it to the kitchen. I’m sure that’s why she didn’t try. But I think she came back to herself at the end, you know? Turned back into the person she must have been. The woman who raised your grandfather, made him who he was or at least let him be. Because somehow she dragged herself into my mother’s room one last time. They died with their arms around each other.”
The dresses, I thought. Had they been arranged like that on purpose? Tucked together, as a memory or a monument? Then I was shivering, sobbing, and my brother was, too. Roz sat silently between us, staring at the floor.
“I shouldn’t have told you,” she mumbled. “Your parents will be furious.”
Seconds later, the front door opened, and our mom and dad came hurtling up the stairs, filling our doorway with their flushed, exhausted, everyday faces.
“What are you doing up?” my mother asked, moving forward fast and stretching one arm toward each of us, though we were too far apart to be gathered that way.
“I’m afraid I—” Roz started.
“Grandpa,” I said, and felt Roz look at me. “We were feeling bad about Grandpa.”
My mother’s mouth twisted, and her eyes closed. “I know,” she said. “Me, too.”
I crawled over to Martin’s bed. My mother held us a long time, while my father stood above her, his hands sliding from her back to our shoulders to our heads. At some point, Roz slipped silently from the room. I didn’t see her go.
For half an hour, maybe more, our parents stayed. Martin showed them the plaque he’d found, and my mother seemed startled mostly by the realization of where we’d been.
“You know I forgot that room was there?” she said. “Your cousins and I used to hide in it all the time. Before the hags came.”
“You shouldn’t call them that,” Martin said, and my mother straightened, eyes narrowed. Eventually, she nodded, and her shoulders sagged.
“You’re right. And I don’t think of them that way, it’s just, at the end . . . Goodnight, kids.”
After they’d gone, switching out all the lights except the butterfly in the hall, I thought I might sleep. But every time I closed my eyes, I swore I felt something pawing at the covers, as though trying to draw them back, so that whatever it was could crawl in with me. Opening my eyes, I found the dark room, the moon outside, the spider shadows in the corners. Several times, I glanced toward my brother’s bed. He was lying on his back with the plaque he’d rescued on his chest and his head turned toward the wall, so that I couldn’t see whether his eyes were open. I listened to the clock ticking and the vents rasping and muttering. A muldoon, and no mistake, I found myself mouthing. Who takes care of his own. When I tried again to close my eyes, it seemed the vent was chanting with me. No mistake. No mistake. My heart seemed to twist in its socket, and its beating bounced on the rhythm of the clock’s tick like a skipped stone. I think I moaned, and Martin rolled over.
“Now let’s play,” he said.
Immediately, I was up, grabbing the sock-ball off the table where I’d left it. I wasn’t anywhere near sleep, and I wasn’t scared of Roz anymore. I wanted to be moving, doing anything. And my brother still wanted me with him.
I didn’t wait for Martin this time, just marched straight out to the landing, casting a single, held-breath glance at Sophie’s door. Someone had pulled it almost closed again, and I wondered if the wooden covering over the opening to the attic had also been replaced. Mrs. Gold’s door, I noticed, had been left open. Pushed open?
Squelching that thought with a shake of my head, I started down the stairs. But Martin galloped up beside me, pushed me against the wall, took the sock-ball out of my hands, and hurried ahead.
“My ups,” he said.
“Your funeral,” I answered, and he stopped three steps down and turned and grinned. A flicker of butterfly light danced in his glasses, which made it look as though something reflective and transparent had moved behind me, but I didn’t turn around, didn’t turn around, turned and found the landing empty.
“She’s asleep,” Martin said, and for one awful moment, I didn’t know whom he meant.
Then I did, and grinned weakly back. “If you say so.” Retreating upstairs, I circled around the balcony into position.
The rules of Martin-Miriam Balcony Ball were simple. The person in the foyer below tried to lob the sock-ball over the railing and have it hit the carpet anywhere on the L-shaped landing. The person on the landing tried to catch the sock and slam it to the tile down in the foyer, triggering an innings change in which both players tried to bump each other off balance as they passed on the steps, thereby gaining an advantage for the first throw of the next round. Play ended when someone had landed ten throws on the balcony, or when Roz came and roared us back to bed, or when any small porcelain animal or tuk-ing grandfather clock or crystal chandelier got smashed. In the five year history of the game, that latter ending had only occurred once. The casualty had been a poodle left out atop the cabinet. This night’s game lasted exactly one throw.
In retrospect, I think the hour or so between the moment our parents left and his invitation to play were no more restful for Martin than they had been for me. He’d lain more still, but that had just compressed the energy the evening had given him, and now he was fizzing like a shaken pop bottle. I watched him glance toward Roz’s hallway, crouch into himself as though expecting a
hail of gunfire, and scurry into the center of the foyer. He looked skeletal and small, like some kind of armored beetle, and the ache that prickled up under my skin was at least partially defensive of him. He would never fill space the way our grandfather had. No one would. That ability—was that the right word?—to love people in general more than the people closest to you, was a rare and only partly desirable thing. Martin, I already knew, didn’t have it.
He must have been kneading the sock-ball all the way down the stairs, because as soon as he reared back and threw, one of the socks slipped free of the knot I’d made and dangled like the tail of a comet. Worse, Martin had somehow aimed straight up, so that instead of arching over the balcony, the sock-comet shot between the arms of the chandelier, knocked crystals together as it reached its apex, and then draped itself, almost casually, over the arm nearest the steps. After that, it just hung.
The chandelier leaned gently left, then right. The clock tuk-ed like a clucking tongue.
“Shit,” Martin said, and something rustled.
“Sssh.” I resisted yet another urge to jerk my head around. I turned slowly instead, saw Sophie’s almost closed door, Mrs. Gold’s wide-open one. Butterfly light. Our room. Nothing else. If the sound I’d just heard had come from downstairs, then Roz was awake. “Get up here,” I said, and Martin came, fast.
By the time he reached me, all that fizzing energy seemed to have evaporated. His shoulders had rounded, and his glasses had clouded over with his exertion. He looked at me through his own fog.
“Mir, what are we going to do?”
“What do you think we’re going to do, we’re going to go get it. You’re going to go get it.”
Martin wiped his glasses on his shirt, eyeing the distance between the landing where we stood and the gently swinging chandelier. “We need a broom.” His eyes flicked hopefully to mine. He was Martin again, alright.
I glanced downstairs to the hallway I’d have to cross to get to the broom closet. “Feel free,” I said.
“Come on, Miriam.”
“You threw it.”
“You’re braver.”
Abruptly, the naked woman from the well in the magazine flashed in front of my eyes. I could almost see—almost hear—her stepping out of the photograph, balancing on those pointed feet. Tiptoeing over the splinter-riddled floor toward those wrapped-together dresses, slipping them over her shoulders.
“What?” Martin said.
“I can’t.”
For the second time that night, Martin took my hand. Before the last couple hours, Martin had last held my hand when I was six years old, and my mother had made him do it whenever we crossed a street, for his protection more than mine, since he was usually thinking about something random instead of paying attention.
“I have a better idea,” he whispered, and pulled me toward the top of the staircase.
As soon as he laid himself flat on the top step, I knew what he was going to do. “You can’t,” I whispered, but what I really meant was that I didn’t believe he’d dare. There he was, though, tilting onto his side, wriggling his head through the railings. His shoulders followed. Within seconds he was resting one elbow in the dust atop the grandfather clock.
Kneeling, I watched his shirt pulse with each tuk, as though a second, stronger heart had taken root inside him. Too strong, I thought, it could pop him to pieces.
“Grab me,” he said. “Don’t let go.”
Even at age ten, my fingers could touch when wrapped around the tops of his ankles. He slid out farther, and the clock came off its back legs and leaned with him. “Fuck!” he blurted, wiggling back as I gripped tight. The clock tipped back the other way and banged its top against the railings and rang them.
Letting go of Martin, I scrambled to my feet, ready to sprint for our beds as I awaited the tell-tale bloom of lights in Roz’s hallway. Martin lay flat, breath heaving, either resigned to his fate or too freaked out to care. It seemed impossible that Roz hadn’t heard what we’d just done, and anyway, she had a sort of lateral line for this kind of thing, sensing movement in her foyer the way Martin said sharks discerned twitching fish.
But somehow, miraculously, no one came. Nothing moved. And after a minute or so, without even waiting for me to hold his legs, Martin slithered forward once more. I dropped down next to him, held tighter. This time, he kept his spine straight, dropping as little of his weight as possible atop the clock. I watched his waist wedge briefly in the railings, then slip through as his arms stretched out. It was like feeding him to something. Worse than the clock’s tuk was the groan from its base as it started to lean again. My hands went sweaty, and my teeth clamped down on my tongue, almost startling me into letting go. I had no idea whether the tears in my ears were fear or exhaustion or sadness for my grandfather or the first acknowledgement that I’d just heard rustling, right behind me.
“Ow,” Martin said as my nails dug into his skin. But he kept sliding forward. My eyes had jammed themselves shut, so I felt rather than saw him grab the chandelier, felt it swing slightly away from, felt his ribs hit the top of the clock and the clock start to tip.
I opened my eyes, not looking back, not behind, it was only the vents, had to be, and then Roz stepped out of her hallway.
Incredibly, insanely, she didn’t see us at first. She had her head down, bracelets jangling, hands jammed in the pockets of her shiny silver robe, and she didn’t even look up until she was dead center under the chandelier, under my brother stretched full-length in mid-air twenty feet over her head with a sock in his hands. Then the clock’s legs groaned under Martin’s suspended weight, and the chandelier swung out, and Roz froze. For that one split second, none of us so much as breathed. And that’s how I knew, even before she finally did lift her eyes. This time, I really had heard it.
“Get back,” my grandmother said, and burst into tears.
It made no sense. I started babbling, overwhelmed by guilt I wasn’t even sure was mine. “Grandma, I’m sorry. Sorry, sorry—”
“BACK!” Roz screamed. “Get away! Get away from them.” With startling speed, she spun and darted up the steps, still shouting.
Them. Meaning us. Which meant she wasn’t talking to us.
The rest happened all in one motion. As I turned, my hands came off Martin’s legs. Instantly, he was gone, tipping, the clock rocking forward and over. He didn’t scream, maybe didn’t have time, but his body flew face-first and smacked into the floor below just as Roz hurtled past and my parents emerged shouting from the guest bedroom and saw their son and the clock smashing and splintering around and atop him and I got my single glimpse of the thing on the landing.
Its feet weren’t pointed, but bare and pale and swollen with veins. It wore some kind of pink, ruffled something, and its hair was white and flying. I couldn’t see its face. But its movements . . . The arms all out of rhythm with the feet, out of order, as if they were being jerked from somewhere else on invisible strings. And the legs, the way they moved . . . not Mrs. Gold’s mindless, surprisingly energetic glide . . . more of a tilting, trembling lurch. Like Sophie’s.
Rooted in place, mouth open, I watched it stagger past the blacked-out mirror, headed from the pink room to the blue one.
“Takes care of his own,” I found myself chanting, helpless to stop. “Takes care of his own. And no mistake. No mistake.” There had been no mistake.
My grandmother was waving her hands in front of her, snarling, stomping her feet as though scolding a dog. Had she already known it was here? Or just understood, immediately? In seconds, she and the lurching thing were in the blue room, and Sophie’s door slammed shut.
“No mistake,” I murmured, tears pouring down my face.
The door flew open again, and out Roz came. My voice wavered, sank into silence as my eyes met hers and locked. Downstairs, my father was shouting frantically into the phone for an ambulance. Roz walked, jangling, to the step above me, sat down hard, put her head on her knees and one of her hands in my hair. Th
en she started to weep.
Martin had fractured his spine, broken one cheekbone, his collarbone, and both legs, and he has never completely forgiven me. Sometimes I think my parents haven’t, either. Certainly, they drew away from me for a long time after that, forming themselves into a sort of protective cocoon around my brother. My family traded phone calls with Roz for years. But we never went back to Baltimore, and she never came to see us.
So many times, I’ve lunged awake, still seeing the Sophie-Mrs. Gold creature lurching at random into my dreams. If I’d ever had the chance, I would have asked Roz only one thing: how much danger had Martin and I really been in? Would it really have hurt us? Was it inherently malevolent, a monster devouring everything it could reach? Or was it just a peculiarly Jewish sort of ghost, clinging to every last vestige of life, no matter how painful or beset by betrayal, because only in life—this life—is there any possibility of pleasure or fulfillment or even release?
I can’t ask anyone else, because Roz is the only one other than me who knows. I have never talked about it, certainly not to Martin, who keeps the plaque he lifted from the attic that night nailed to his bedroom wall.
But I know. And sometimes, I just want to scream at all of them, make them see what’s staring them right in the face, has been obvious from the moment it happened. My grandfather, the muldoon who took care of his own, during the whole weekend he was away with Roz, never once called his mother? Never called home? Never checked in with Mrs. Gertzen, just to see how everyone was? And Mrs. Gertzen had no family, had left no indication to the service that employed her of what jobs she might have been engaged in?
People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy Page 36
