by Abi Maxwell
Brick, dust, streaks of light like the wings of a god or some great being. Silence in the building and in the children’s hearts, too. Rose’s hand went out and grabbed her brother’s and he didn’t squeeze back but he didn’t pull away, either. They were in the dark and pink stomach of a giant. Above them what used to be a ceiling had turned to a maze of beams and light and darkness. Dust in Rose’s mouth, and her brother’s. The floor dust only, whatever it had been before gone now. And the smell, not like an old book and not like an old house but something in between. Not that machine smell that you might expect from a factory. Rose breathed it in and closed her eyes and watched as this woman, Eliza Plimpton, laid herself down in her bottom bunk and pulled a starched white sheet up to her neck. The sheet perfectly creased over the top of the blanket, a little white lip to hold her in. Rose watched as in the dark purple morning Eliza Plimpton walked up the great hill on what used to be a dirt road but now was grown over. Workers behind her and workers in front of her, all along the hill. Hundreds of lunch pails in hundreds of hands. What were they going to make?
“Buttons,” Rose said, and picked up a red button from the dirt floor. It was the first word that either of them spoke inside the building, and just after the word dropped so, too, did something across the way. It wasn’t a crash or a scurry but just a movement, like a clearing of the throat, a movement to announce a presence. When Rose and Gerald looked from the button to the direction of the noise it was through large shafts of light that moved in singular strands like the shadows of long, flying people.
Rose moved across the building first. Her brother wouldn’t have done it. But since she did he had to follow.
“Hello?” she called. “Olly olly oxen free.” A bird soared down from a rafter and then up in small circles. “This ain’t no place to live,” Rose said.
Toward the middle of the building the disparate strands of light found a home together, and from there they stretched eastward in one great path. That path ended in the corner. There was nothing in the building—at least not on this floor—no old tables or chairs, no machines. But over in the corner where the light fell there was a shoebox. Rose approached it gently, as though it were a new friend who might be scared off. She touched it. Warm from the sun. She sat down and her brother stood over her and when she opened the old blue box and removed a folded piece of paper and read, “Dear Simon,” her brother grabbed the letter and the box from her.
“True love!” Rose exclaimed. “Eliza Plimpton found her true love!”
The paper had an extra crinkle to it, as if it had been wet and then dried. Yellow legal paper, a kind neither Gerald nor his sister had ever written upon before. Gerald read the letter to himself. Dear Simon, The lake calls out to me. Sometimes I dream of walking into it and resuming life beneath. I read once of the spirits of the water, how they do in fact call to people, sometimes with benevolence (Gerald did not understand that word, not the sound or the sense of it) and sometimes harm in mind. I listen to the loons and am sure their call is one of pure love. When will you come to the island, Simon?
“Puke,” Gerald said. He put the letter back in the box where there were at least twenty more with it and put the box under his arm and told his sister to follow; they were leaving the old factory.
That night Rose and Gerald had dinner with their grandparents, and after dinner Rose took the box from under her chair (she’d kept it there while they ate) and got her flashlight from beneath the couch cushion and put her coat on and went out to keep her nightly watch for Tasha, who had just moved to the neighborhood. Tasha walked by each night on her way home from work at the nursing home, and to Rose, she was the most kind and beautiful woman to ever be put upon the earth.
Outside, Rose felt she could hear the coldness of the river. The leaves were just beginning to drop so as Rose sat there under the sugar maple with her box of letters and a flashlight, every once in a while a leaf would flutter down before her, and it seemed to her to be endlessly romantic. There were words in these letters that she didn’t understand, but there was one word that the girl’s letters always had: love. How I love the look of the lake at night. This island fills me with pure love. Love, Alice. The man’s letters weren’t so romantic, but they were there, a response to each letter Alice had sent. His letters said “lonely” a lot of the time—Work all day and my dog gets lonely. Lonely up north where I’m working now. You out on the island all alone must be lonely. Also his letters had one sentence nearly every time, Be on the island soon. And once: Ninety-nine percent sure I’m in love with you. The one percent left is waiting to talk to your eyes.
Oh! Rose read that and fell right over into the cold grass and leaves.
“What you got?” Tasha asked, when she appeared. (And how Tasha would have liked to see those letters. Of course she didn’t know that it was her Kenneth who had stolen them, but had she seen the letters she would have figured it out.)
At first, for about a week, Rose had only said hello to Tash, and then after nearly two weeks she had gathered the courage to go out to the sidewalk and introduce herself. Now it had been nearly two months and Rose knew things about Tasha that nearly no one else in the world knew, like that Tasha had left her love, Kenneth, and lived alone now. She knew that at night Tasha’s greatest joy was to fix herself a plate of food and then do all the dishes and wipe all the counters before sitting down to eat. She’d have to heat the meal up again, but when she sat down to eat the entire house sparkled around her, silent and still. Also she knew that Tash had left her dogs with Kenneth when she left him, so now no one in the world needed a single thing from her, except when she was at work.
Rose stuffed the letters back into the box and put it behind her back. “How’s Mrs. Lewis?”
“Same,” Tash said. “Only today she thinks it was me and not her son bought her the new pillow.”
“And Sophie? Did she come today?”
“Don’t you have a good memory,” Tash said. She told the girl that dear Sophie Wickholm—who was in her seventies but still put her shoes on and marched herself all the way down the hill and over to the nursing home each Wednesday morning to play the piano for the residents—had indeed come today.
“It’s good to have a friend you can talk to,” Rose said to Tasha, because Tasha had told her that though Sophie was an old woman, the two had become the sort of friends who could say nearly anything to each other. Rose wanted that sort of friend.
Lately Rose had been having a problem sleeping, though her family didn’t know it. Most of the time she could fall asleep when she lay down, but by the time the moon was up over her house she’d be awake again. For a few weeks she’d just lain there in her bed staring at the wall and trying to stay perfectly still, but finally she’d tired of that and crept outside. There she would just stand in the yard and look up at the sky and open her arms and breathe and feel filled up and nearly free. One night when a car drove by and honked Rose lifted her fist and yelled at the driver to stop interrupting her peace and quiet. She bit down on her lip and kicked the tree and then she said, “Damn it all, Justin Green.”
That was it, it was out. She’d looked around to make sure no one had heard her. She hadn’t said his name since the day it had happened. But after it was out there, floating in the air, Rose crept back in and found her flashlight and walked down the road to his house and there she stared up at his window and held a rock in her hand, but she hadn’t thrown it that night or any night since.
Tonight Rose put the box of letters under the covers, at the base of her bed, and kept her feet touching them as she drifted off to sleep.
“Oh, it’s heaven,” she said aloud. She meant it was heaven to be Alice and in love.
It took a week for Rose to get to the bottom of the pile of letters and realize that there was a problem. That they went back and forth, Alice Thorton at 33 Bear Island, Kettleborough, and Simon Wentworth at PO Box 59, Kettleborough, but that toward the end of each one of them Alice kept saying she wished she
would hear from Simon, and Simon kept saying he wished he would hear from Alice. And then those last few letters: I suppose you don’t love me. Or, I shall interpret your silence as a wish to remain alone. It was when Rose woke up in the night to a wind so heavy her window rattled that it suddenly came to her, she had her hands on long-lost love letters, and that somewhere in the world there floated two loveless people who were in fact in love.
“Oh my God!” Rose yelled. When her grandmother awoke to the sound and came rushing into the room—for on some nights Rose liked to sleep at her grandparents’ house, in her grandfather’s nightshirt—Rose told her it was a ghost, that she had seen the ghost of Eliza Plimpton. What else could she say? Her grandmother in that tattered white nightgown, it was the first image to come to Rose’s mind.
“Get yourself to sleep, you fool,” her grandmother said.
That morning at breakfast Rose wouldn’t eat.
“You sick, honey?”
“I done picked myself up a broken heart,” Rose told her.
Rose’s brother had lost interest in the letters, and Rose hadn’t told her grandmother about them, so she knew she was basically doomed to suffer alone. No one had yet taught her how to use a telephone book to look up the writers, and besides that, Rose was nearly certain that these letters were ancient, and all that would be left of the lovers was their lonely ghosts. She didn’t know that the dates were right there on the envelopes—that these letters had ended not two months ago. She pushed her bowl of cereal to the middle of the table and dropped her head onto her arms.
“Oh, all the world for Alice Thorton and Simon Wentworth,” she said.
Her grandmother was at the sink, listening to the radio, and when she heard that she just let go of the glass in her hand and it shattered. She left the pieces there and went to her granddaughter and tilted the girl’s chin her way and she said, “What? What is it you’ve gotten yourself into?”
“A twisted love affair of a time gone by!” Rose cried out.
“Those names, what did you say? Tell me those names again.”
Rose looked at her grandmother and in her eyes there was a look she never had seen before. The darks of her eyes were fluttering right there in the center of the white.
“Alicia Thermos and Silo Wentaway,” Rose said quickly.
“Say it again.”
“Alison Thermin and Simone Wendell!” Her chin was in her grandmother’s hand and Rose herself was sweating.
“That’s not what you said.”
“I made it up, I made it up, I got myself an imaginating mind!”
Pam let go of her granddaughter. Anyway, she had been listening to that old song. She might have misheard the girl after all. “Get,” she said. “Go get yourself to school.”
Rose went to the bedroom and put the letters in the bottom of her schoolbag and went out to meet her brother on the curb. Which meant that behind her Rose had left no trace; that though her grandmother scoured her own house and Rose’s parents’ house, too, she found not one sign of Alice Thorton.
“I thought I heard something today,” Pam said to her dear friend Valerie Hill. They were at Valerie’s place, a big old house that her silence had bought her. Back when Valerie had still been drinking was the last time the two of them had ever talked about it, or the girl. Back then, when letters postmarked in Oregon came from Jennifer to Malcolm, at least those rich Wickholms had flown Valerie out across the country and put her up in a hotel to search for her missing daughter. But—and only Pam knew this—by the time Valerie returned, alone, her empty house had been paid off and the infant—her own grandbaby—announced in the paper as Alice Thorton. Amid the haze that followed was the only time Pam had ever heard Valerie question the events. Had Valerie’s Jennifer and Karl Wickholm planned to leave their infant like that? Valerie couldn’t believe that her Jennifer, sixteen years old and still dressing her dolls, would have deserted her own infant at the edge of the lake. But what about Karl? Was his car accident a mistake? Had Jennifer been in that crash that killed him? Is that why she ran? Had they abandoned the baby first? Our Karl, those Wickholms had said. Our Karl cannot date a Hill.
Pam lifted the tea bag out of her mug and wrapped the string tightly around the leaves until all the liquid was squeezed out. She carried it to the trashcan with one hand held beneath it in case it dripped. She pressed her foot on the base of the can to lift its top and as it opened she said quickly, “Alice Thorton. Thought I heard my Rose say that.”
“Well,” Valerie said. “I got to get myself going on my errands.”
The letters in Rose’s backpack made her feel as if she had a secret strength. When she had to read aloud to the class her voice did not tremble. When she went to the chalkboard to subtract a three-digit number from a four-digit number, she got it right even though she had to stand there in front of everyone, Justin Green included, while she counted backward with her fingers. It was at recess that the problem started.
“Why you got to bring your backpack out with you?”
“Hush up,” Rose said.
“No one else brings a bag out.”
Rose shrugged and pulled at a clump of her own hair, then put it right in her mouth and chewed.
“Gross as I always thought you was.” This was Justin Green. His first words to her since that day.
“Open your bag and show us what you got,” he said.
Rose spit the hair from her mouth, and the wet clump of it stuck there against her cheek. The fence that went around the school playground had one opening in it, there at the back by the willow tree. She could crawl through that and go home. The day was gray and it made the whole world look dirty. She crossed her arms in front of her chest and she said, “Maybe I got a secret mission in this world.”
“Maybe you got yourself girl troubles,” he said. “Because you’re disgusting like I always thought.”
The others heard that, and when the bell rang and they all went in no one would walk next to Rose, believing that she indeed had girl troubles—something they only vaguely understood but certainly thought of as dirty. Rose kept her bag in her lap and throughout the rest of the day she prayed silently to Alice Thorton and Simon Wentworth to save her from her misery.
The worst part was when the trains went by. The rumble made the floor of the school vibrate in a way Rose had never realized before. It sent that same looseness to her teeth that she’d felt out there on the track in the summer with Justin Green. What they’d done out there felt nothing like what Alice Thorton would ever feel with Simon Wentworth. The thought of it made her stomach hurt. And then after, the way he’d held her down with his teeth clenched and her shoulders on the iron track. A train had been coming, getting closer all the time, and he wouldn’t let her up and he just kept saying it, You’re disgusting, you’re disgusting and now I’m going to make you die. The taste of his tongue had still been in her mouth and Rose had spit it in his face, she hadn’t been afraid.
Rose’s brother walked home ahead of her, he always did, so Rose was alone and speaking a little to herself as she walked. Alice Thorton, she was saying, I understand the longing that you feel, left foot, right foot, don’t step on a crack, I, too, long for the lake and to feel at home with another human being. She didn’t know she was being followed, and when she felt a tug at her backpack she thought a strap had let loose so she stopped, and before she had turned around Justin Green had thrown her into the bush at the side of the road, which was alongside a steep hill. Dirt in Rose’s hair, her backpack crushed in the dirt beneath her.
“What is it?” he demanded. “What’s so secret?”
Rose kicked but she did not scream; she didn’t want any single person to find her here in the bushes with Justin Green. He pulled her hair and turned her over, gritting his teeth all the while, and he dug her face into the dirt. Months ago, after Justin Green stopped being her friend and became the worst person in the world, Rose had borrowed her brother’s jackknife and with it sharpened the tip of a piece
of wood. She had planned to use it for protection—she had had the sense that she would need to and now she knew she had been right. Rose pulled that piece of wood out of her pocket and she jammed it into Justin Green’s body as hard as she could. In it went, right into his stomach. He screamed and whimpered and Rose Hughes picked up her backpack and ran down the street without looking back.
One night, long ago, Rose had sat with her brother at the top of the hill by the factory, looking down on sleeping Kettleborough. That time, Rose had looked at the houses and received from them the distinct feeling that she could understand the lives of the people inside. Like the world and all the people within it made sense to her. Now when she looked down on that small place and the dark lake that rose up behind it, Rose bit her lip harder and pulled at her hair and then released and began to pound her open hands against the sides of her head. Love didn’t exist, not anything like it. Goodness neither. Rose had killed—she believed she had—and now she and all the world were doomed.
Now to the factory Rose had brought matches, a blanket, and a jackknife, which she borrowed from her grandfather’s top drawer. Food she had not bothered with because she had not been sure how long she intended to survive. Water, though—she had taken an empty milk jug from the trashcan and filled it in the sink. The letters, too, of course she had those. And a flashlight. Darkness fell early and when it did Rose was already in the corner of the factory, a blanket wrapped around her. She bit her lip until it bled. She shook, too, from fear or cold or both. When she heard a creak she held her breath and imagined that a criminal had been lurking in the woods, waiting for her, had watched her enter the building. She imagined him now coming upon her and stabbing her to death. As she had done to Justin Green. Rose held the jackknife open, tight in her fist. In this way she passed what felt like half the night, though in truth it was scarcely an hour. By eight o’clock the moon had risen over the crest of the hill, and it was near full, and it sent light into the building—enough to illuminate the quick swoop and dart of hundreds of bats. No more could she bear it. Rose gathered her things and crawled across the floor, back to the boarded window she had entered through.
