by Rosa Sophia
Kat sighed heavily and licked at her cone, trying to keep the ice cream from dripping down her wrist. She was already sticky with chocolate.
“It would be nice if you were right, Cor. I hope you are.”
***
The dreams continued. Day after day, week after week, month after tormenting month. She couldn’t stand it, but she was afraid to change it.
“Kat? Katherine?” Jake’s voice was muffled because she was beneath the blankets at ten o’clock on a Monday morning, two hours late for the job she’d only had for a few weeks.
Everything was dark and peaceful under here. She didn’t want to be awake, but she didn’t want to sleep either. With sleep came the endless torment of that dream, the dream in which Kat was faced with a past that wasn’t even hers. And when she was awake, what did she think of? The dream. The dream, the dream, the dream.
Her life wasn’t hers anymore. It was consumed with that woman’s memory, with her intentions, whatever they might have been. Julie Maslin was like a parasite in Katherine’s thoughts, filling her dreams and waking moments with hopeless anger. Something horrible had indeed happened, something that Kat couldn’t comprehend. And that was why she couldn’t stop thinking about her.
“Katherine?” The blanket was pulled away from her face and she squinted at the light that unexpectedly drowned her.
“Jake,” she muttered.
“Have you decided yet?”
“Yes. Next year. Next year we’ll move.”
***
It had taken her four months to come to a decision. They had that option, although the house was slowly deteriorating without anyone living in it. By the time they finally packed up their few belongings and set out, a year or so had passed since she’d first seen that photograph. It was springtime. New things were appearing and ideas were coming to fruition like baby robins out of their eggs.
When they dragged their things into the foyer of the farmhouse, Kat laughed.
“Jake, look at this.” She gestured to the foyer itself, the staircase that marched fluidly up toward the second floor, and the hallways that extended to various parts of the house.
“What is it?” He closed the door behind them and sat down on one of the steps.
“Look at this place. All we have is our mattress, a dresser, a beanbag chair, boxes of books and my art supplies. We don’t even need this much room. I don’t know what happened to my grandmother’s furniture. She must have sold most of it. What the hell are we doing here?” Kat laughed again and wandered through the nearest entryway, which led from the foyer straight into the dining room. “This place is a mansion.”
“So we’ll buy some furniture at the thrift store. No big deal. And there’s already some stuff in the living room. We haven’t even checked the attic yet.” Jake shrugged. “Besides, this place is great. We haven’t even seen all of it. Think of all the exploring we can do. And what we can do while we’re exploring.”
“Honey, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have sex and walk around the property at the same time.”
“Well,” Jake looked at her and grinned. “Are you sure you don’t want to try it?”
“Come on, I’ll make us some coffee. Then we can get to it,” she replied sarcastically.
***
Kat’s mother was extremely happy to learn that she had finally bought some furniture. Oddly enough, this pleased her more than her daughter actually having her own house. Something in the tone of her voice suggested that she wished Kat wasn’t living there. Every now and then, she would bring up some odd fact that she hoped would make Kat want to move. She could tell that she was just grasping for ideas. Her mother obviously didn’t know anything about the property.
“That barn. That barn, Katherine, is the most rickety old thing I’ve ever seen. What if it falls on the house?”
“Mama, it’s not that close to the house.”
“Oh. Well. I seem to remember it was only several yards away, but I haven’t been there in a long time.”
“Don’t worry about it, Mama. Really. As soon as Jake and I save up enough money, we’re going to have the barn restored and fix a lot of things around the house.”
“Oh, dear, what else is broken? Kat, are the stairs dangerous?”
“No, Mama.”
***
Their furniture didn’t consist of much when one ignored the dusty armchair in the living room and the old tables and chairs they found in the basement. Kat had gone to the cheapest thrift store she could find. She sniffed all the couches when no one was looking and picked a blue one that was mildly attractive and didn’t smell of dog urine. She bought it for ten dollars, as well as a kitchen table and several sets of shelves for what she and Jake had decided to call their library.
They talked about getting a television set, but it seemed like a waste of money since they didn’t care for TV anyway. All in all, the house didn’t really appear as full as Kat thought it would once they’d gotten more furniture. The foyer was barren, the hallways were empty and Kat almost expected sagebrush to go dancing through several of the cavernous rooms.
She had a few paintings and posters from their old apartment, but ended up adorning her newly acquired art studio with almost every one of them. Years ago, Kat’s life had been bogged down with material objects, but now she was beginning to feel as though she needed more of them, like she was suddenly missing out on end tables, armchairs, vintage lamps, tapestries, and cabinets with glass doors. With a tiny apartment, those feelings were cast out by not having enough space. Suddenly, they were living in a veritable cave and poor Katherine didn’t know what to do with it all.
“It’s really not as big as you think,” Jake had assured her. “There are five bedrooms, sure, but we can use the others for storage.”
“Storage? Storage of what, Jake? Pretty little odds and ends? I can’t remember the last time I had anything close to an ‘odd or end.’”
“Let’s just see what happens, okay? If we can make this place really nice, even restore that barn out there, we’ll be able to sell it for a lot of money. I don’t see why you’d want to, though.” Jake strode over to the nearest window and looked out toward the patch of woods beyond the backyard. The roof of a cookie-cutter house peeked over the tops of the trees. “This is a great place,” he said. “And it’s family inheritance. The mortgage was paid years ago and all we have to worry about is paying property taxes, utilities, and fixing things.”
“That’s gonna be hard, Jake. Really hard.”
“We’ll take it one step at a time, okay?” He pulled Kat into his arms and kissed her. “Everything will be fine.”
***
She saw her again. Kat was beginning to notice subtle differences each time she had the dream. The difference was all in her grandmother’s expression. It was becoming less angry and more urgent, as though she knew something was coming and she didn’t know how to stop it. Her eyes said, “I don’t know what to do.”
This time, Kat was able to respond to her screams, but she wasn’t sure the nearly frantic woman had heard her. Kat called out to her just as she turned away.
“Julie Maslin,” she shouted. “I don’t know what it is you need, but I can hear you!”
When she woke up sweating in the middle of the night, she wondered what had possessed her to say such a thing. After all, Julie wouldn’t have heard Katherine. She was just another part of the dream.
***
The month of June found the couple in the same predicament, jobless and helpless, for Katherine had been fired from her last job after selfishly coveting three days for herself. Now, all she had was the meager income she acquired by selling her paintings. Jake had quit his job in Souderton and was looking for one close by. They worked on the house most of the time, fixing broken things and somehow pulling money together for the bills. Whenever Kat sold a painting, the cash never burnt holes in her pockets. It was already in check-form, in somebody else’s hand. Kat helped Jake replace some of the sh
ingles on the roof one day, then went to her studio to paint.
She had an image of that brokenhearted old man in her mind, Phillip Maslin, her grandfather. She thought of him and imagined what he looked like now, painting the image with mostly earth tones. In his hands, on the wet canvas, he held an anthology of Shakespeare’s plays. Days later, when the painting dried, Kat thought of her recurring dream and hid the canvas away, because she couldn’t bear to think that one more photo might lead to the discovery that she had somehow known exactly what her grandfather looked like, without ever having met him.
***
One evening, Jake and Katherine were driven indoors by the howling wind and a sudden rainstorm that lasted all of thirty minutes. They turned on a Janis Joplin CD and danced, then ordered pizza and ate it while sitting atop the kitchen counter. Kat was wearing a red bandanna over her blond head, a pair of shorts and a tank top. When she finished her supper, she slipped on an over-shirt, noting the sudden chill in the air.
“I’m going to go upstairs and put some things away,” she announced, recalling that she’d left a few boxes of books sitting in the corner of her new studio.
“Okay, babe,” Jake said cheerfully, slipping some dishes into the sink. “Don’t get lost.”
“If I don’t come back in twenty minutes, send the Mounties,” Kat told him, laughing.
The steps that led up to the second floor were overly decorated with scuff marks that would never go away and stains from drinks spilled long ago. Kat felt as though she were trampling the past when she walked up those stairs, stepping all over peoples’ dreams and memories. Proceeding up into the hallway, she felt suddenly isolated.
She could no longer hear Jake as he bustled around in the kitchen. She remembered reading a book concerning the personification of death, a book that had inspired many a macabre painting on her part. The book talked of instances when people claimed they had seen Death, even spoken with Him. Kat tried to remember the surroundings under which it was most likely for a sighting to occur.
She heard the fish tank she’d set up in the library as the water bubbled gracefully through the filter. That was one of them, wasn’t it? Yes, she thought. People are either near moving water when they see Death, or they hear it, as though a stream had come from the clouds and trickled against stones on the ground. It wasn’t just the water, either. When you saw Death, everything around you became completely silent, as though you had your own universe and it was suddenly normal that it was disconnecting with reality.
Katherine shivered and continued through the hallway, her chin held high. She didn’t want to think that Death was there, watching her. The wood creaked beneath her and she noted all the spots where the floor had rotted. There were holes between the planks that fell away into darkness. She hadn’t noticed this when they’d been given the tour of the house and if she had, she hadn’t been paying much attention.
For all she could remember, this could have been her first time in this particular area of the house. Katherine felt a flutter in her heart. She was frightened. Was the floor even strong enough to hold her up, after all these years of decay? Up until his last day in this house, Phillip Maslin probably hadn’t done much to fix anything. After all, he was an old man. Maybe he hadn’t even come up here anymore. The stairs might have been too much for him.
Despite the other thoughts that rushed through her mind, distracting her, Katherine still saw the glimmer in the corner of her eye. She glanced around and didn’t see it a second time, but she knew where it had come from. Kneeling down on the aging wood, she looked into one of the holes in the floor. Dust and cobwebs covered the entrance into darkness and she certainly didn’t want to stick her hand in it, but she did. Her fingers quested through emptiness until they reached the bottom of the cavity. Then she searched gently, moving her fingertips through the thick dust and heat.
Katherine was just about to give up when she felt something smooth under her index finger. Scooping it up, she pulled it out of the hole and readied herself for the worst.
But when she looked at the tiny object in her hand, she gasped. It wasn’t anything horrible, no bone of an animal or a piece of a rat. It was beautiful. Then she wiped the dust off it and grinned. How it had gotten here, she didn’t know, but she was happy she had found it. It was lovely.
***
“Who do you suppose it belonged to?” Katherine asked. She had completely ignored the task she’d gone upstairs to complete. She couldn’t keep this find to herself, not with how strange it was—strange because she had found it in this very house, under the floor.
Jake had finished putting away the dishes. He took the object from Katherine and studied it in the light.
“You found this under the floorboards upstairs?” he asked.
“Yeah. I saw something shine in the light. You know how the sunlight comes in through the window at the end of the hall? It must have hit it just right, because I saw it when I was near the library. By the way, we really need to fix some of those floorboards.” She leaned around his shoulder and looked at it in his hands, as though it belonged there, possessed by them both at once.
“It’s a pretty ring,” he remarked. “Looks like real gold. I wonder if that diamond is real.” The stone in the ring’s center was quite tiny and almost insignificant. It seemed to melt away into the gold like a pebble sinking in water.
“I doubt it,” Katherine said. “If it belonged to my grandmother, then I definitely doubt it. They were farmers. There’s no way they could have afforded a real diamond.”
“You’re probably right, Kat. What are you going to do with it?”
“What do you think? I’m going to wear it.” Katherine grinned and slipped the ring on the middle finger of her left hand. She extended her arm and smiled at the sight of the jewelry on her finger. “I’ve never been much for gold, but if it’s got a history, I love it. Now I’m going to go up and finish unpacking those books.” She kissed Jake on the lips and bounded back toward the staircase. It only took a second before she felt as though the ring was becoming a part of her.
***
Katherine climbed out of bed in the middle of the night, or so it seemed. It could have been early morning, perhaps three o’clock or even later, but she had no way of knowing. When she looked for the watch she’d discarded on the ground beside their bed, her questing fingers couldn’t find it.
“Jake?” She turned around and reached toward the other side of the bed, but her lover wasn’t there. The room was dark and foreboding. Something told her that if she were to reach for the light, it wouldn’t be there either. The lamp was gone.
They had plugged it in a while ago and left it sitting on the floor, with no end table to place it on, but the generous source of light had disappeared. What was Jake doing that would have required the lamp and Kat’s old silver-plated watch?
She climbed out of bed to investigate and found that the floor was extremely chilly, even though the wood had never felt that cold on her feet before. She crept toward the door to their bedroom. It was shut, even though Kat had left it open when she’d gone to bed. Assuming Jake had closed it, she turned the knob and proceeded into the hallway. It was more lit up than the bedroom had been, which gave Kat an uneasy feeling because she couldn’t tell where the light was coming from.
Down the hall and toward the steps she went, passing the area in which she had discovered the ring. She quested for it with her thumb and there it was—soft, smooth gold against her warm flesh.
The light was coming from downstairs. Kat took the steps quickly as she’d become accustomed to doing, then found herself in the foyer. She looked to her right and saw the dining room with its solitary ancient table and chairs. Glancing to her left, she found the light. It was the fireplace in the living room. How the glinting orange flames had extended their illumination all the way to the upstairs hallway was beyond her. And why had Jake lit a fire in the middle of summer? Where was he?
“Jake?” Kat realized that her
voice was meek and barely rising above the sound of the crackling flames. She hadn’t acknowledged it until now, but she was scared. Tiptoeing into the room as though she had something to hide from, Kat stopped halfway to the fireplace.
There was a figure standing there before the hearth as though it’d always been there. Kat gasped and the woman turned. The dress, hair, her face—it was so recognizable yet so unbelievable. It was Julie Maslin.
“Grandma?” Kat choked. “What are you doing here?”
The woman smiled slightly, but Kat could tell that it was phony. There was something dark and sad behind her eyes. Was there anger as well, the likes of which Kat had seen in her dream?
“Be careful with that ring, Katherine.” Had her lips moved, had they even quivered? Kat blinked. Her grandmother was beginning to blur around the edges.
I’m so tired. I just want to go back to sleep.
“What are you talking about?” She was trying hard to keep her eyes open.
“I didn’t want to throw it away, really. But it became such a bother. I’m so tired of him. I wish he would just leave me alone.”
“What do you mean? Do you mean Grandpa? He’s in an old folks’ home.”
Is that me talking? Kat wondered. I’m speaking to her as though it’s no surprise she’s here, as though grandparents are supposed to come back from the dead and have heart-to-hearts with the next generation.
“Phillip won’t leave me alone. I wish you could understand. I wish you could. Maybe I could have my ring back?”
Julie walked forward. Her body blurred. The hearth grew indistinct and so did the fire. The room became fringed with a fuzzy aura until Kat had to squint to see. “Could I please have it back? Please, Katherine? I know I threw it away, but that upset him. Maybe if I just put it back on, he won’t be angry with me anymore.”
