Jane Was Here

by Sarah Kernochan

  “Then Philip brought over the finest glassblowers he could find from Italy.” She leads him to grainy 19th century photos of workers holding strange tools, gaunt-framed in grimy clothes, posed before hulking machines. Their haunted eyes make them look hungry and sick.

  “The factory produced eight tons of leaded glass weekly,” she is still talking, “which was cut and shipped to Boston for sale. Maybe you saw some of these beautifully-finished pieces when you came in.”

  How will he and Gita get away from their parents for the hours it will take to climb up and down Rowell Hill? The Poonchwallas are making Gita do her summer reading at home before school starts. And Brett has been “supervising” Collin ever since the cop brought him home, managing to keep his son close while still completely ignoring him. Like today, dragging him to the Historical Society and palming him off on this weird lady.

  “…Then, in 1853, Philip Graynier died of stomach cancer. His son Ellis Graynier—my great-grandfather—took charge.”

  Why are they even here? It must have something to do with Jane. Everything his dad does these days comes down to Jane.

  They stop before an oil painting of a family posed in a richly decorated parlor, a handsome, dark-browed, unsmiling man seated at its center. “That’s Ellis.” Two younger women languidly play cards, their mountainous hoop skirts wedged under the card table. “Those are his two sisters.”

  Collin looks over at a pasty, blond, blank-faced woman standing in the corner as if cringing against the picture frame. Elsa explains: “And that is my great-grandmother Ophelia. Her family owned textile mills all over New England. When she married Ellis, her money added consider ably to the Graynier fortune. Eventually she went insane.”

  Collin pricks up his ears. “She was crazy?”

  “I think her heart was broken. All her children died in infancy, except my grandfather Faro.” She nods to a ringlet-haired child crouched on the carpet of the painting, playing with a wooden elephant on wheels. “His maiden aunts named him after their favorite card game.”

  The whole family looks crazy to Collin, starting with the old lady beside him flapping her mouth.

  “Business declined once Ellis took over the factory,” she continues as they move toward more exhibits. “The forests were depleted, and coal was expensive. And then, so many men were lost to the Civil War…”

  Collin is drifting toward the exit when his gaze falls on a daguerreotype hanging beside the door. The boy stops to stare.

  A wrinkled, white-maned old man, face bracketed by muttonchop whiskers, glares fiercely at the camera. There is a deep whorled scar under his cheekbone: it looks as if half his face is being sucked into a hole.

  “Who’s that?” Collin asks, creeped out.

  Elsa comes alongside. “That’s Ellis Graynier, too, but much older.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “A gunshot to the face. The factory laborers were threatening to strike and Ellis hired guards to raid the shanties looking for unionists. Somehow a fire got started. Several children died trapped inside the shacks. The father of one tried to assassinate Ellis. Fortunately, the town had an excellent surgeon, and Ellis lived to the grand old age of 83.”

  “What happened to the guy who shot him?”

  “He was hanged, I suppose, like the other one.” She lowers her voice. “Someone tried to kill Ellis once before, over a factory girl he’d got in the family way. Ellis was a naughty man, I’m afraid.”

  What did it mean, “the family way”? If the Graynier family way was insanity, then did Ellis make the factory girl go insane too? Was craziness like a virus that the Grayniers spread around?

  He backs away from Elsa Graynier so he won’t catch it.

  “Are you going to the St. Paul’s fair tomorrow?” she asks.

  “What’s that?”

  “The church puts on a carnival every August. The fair is held on the same grounds where the glass factory once stood.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “The government took it over for the manufacture of munitions during World War Two. Afterwards my father closed it for good. Later some vandals set fire to the building and it burned down.” She sighs. “It’s just a field now. But the fair is very jolly! There are rides and games and lots of food. Crowds of people attend from all over the county.”

  Crowds. An idea starts forming.

  “…So if you go, you can walk around imagining what it looked like in the old days.”

  Collin abruptly heads back to the reading room, where he announces to his father, “I have to go to Gita’s.”

  Brett doesn’t look up from the book he’s paging through. “I’m not finished yet.”

  Elsa joins them. “We had a fine time, your little boy and I. He was awfully interested in the exhibit.”

  Collin says loudly, “It’s boring here! I don’t want to stay!”

  For the first time that afternoon Brett focuses on his son. “Apologize to Miss Graynier for your rudeness.”

  “Sorry,” Collin says to the floor.

  Elsa looks deflated. “It seems few people are interested in the story of glass.” With a sharp jerk, Brett pulls Collin down on the seat beside him. “Sit down and behave. You’re not going any where.” He turns to Elsa. “Do you have something for my son to look at while we’re working?”

  “I have a lovely book of gravestone rubbings, sweetheart.”

  “No, thank you.” Collin kicks his father’s chair leg angrily.

  Ignoring him, Brett beckons Elsa over to his open volume. “I found a Jane Pettigrew listed in the 1850 census, but not 1860. Does that mean she moved away sometime during those ten years?”

  “Possibly. Or she stayed, but got married and changed her name. Or she died.”

  Just as Collin thought: his dad is trying to find Jane. But why here, in a museum?

  “The church registries recorded deaths and marriages,” Elsa says. “Unfortunately we have to look through ten years of them for all six churches in Graynier, unless we know which denomination the Pettigrews belonged to. What does the 1850 census give as her birth date?”

  Brett reads aloud, “Pettigrew, Jane. Date of birth: March 2, 1833. Place of Birth: Graynier, Massachusetts.”

  “That makes it easier. We’ll assume she was baptized in the same year as her birth. Let’s look through the six 1833 registries until we find her, and that will tell us which church we need to focus on. Give me a moment to pull the books from the archive.” She leaves the room.

  Collin asks, “Who’s Jane Pettigrew?”

  “A lady who lived a long time ago. I don’t know much about her yet.”

  “Why’re you so interested in someone you don’t know anything about?”

  Brett is quiet for a moment. “Is Gita a Hindu?”

  “Why?”

  “You know what that is, right?”

  “Yeah. She told me her parents used to be Hindus but now they go to a Christian church.”

  “Does Gita ever talk about something called reincarnation? Where somebody dies and comes back as another person, or a dog or whatever?”

  You are the reincarnation of Yenu Krisnu. Don’t tell anyone. We have to battle in secret, or all is lost, the fate of the world and everyone in it.

  “Gita never said anything about that,” Collin lies.

  Elsa returns, unloading large books stamped with gilt crosses onto the table in two piles. “You check the Catholic, Unitarian and Christ Church registries and I’ll do the Presbyterian, Methodist and Universalist.”

  Brett reaches for the first volume.

  “I wanna go to Gita’s now!” Collin explodes.

  Brett starts turning pages. “What is it about ‘no’ you don’t understand?”

  “It’s just down the street! You let me go by myself a hundred times!”

  “Stop bothering us.” Brett and Elsa bend their heads over their task, as if Collin isn’t even there.

  The boy walks over to the display cases. What co
uld be more trivial than these bottles and goblets and plates and little glass birds, when evil is about to swallow the whole world?

  The door of one case is slightly open, the key still in the lock. Studying the array of stemware on the shelves, Collin eases the door wider, then carefully picks up a delicate pink cup. The display card says “Blown Stem Cordial Glass.” He studies tiny bumps of purple grape clusters decorating the cup.

  He opens his hand and lets it drop.

  The splintering crash brings Elsa rushing over. “Oh, no! Oh, no! You bad, terrible boy!”

  Brett marches Collin out to the sidewalk. “Go to Gita’s and wait for me there. No going off on bikes, understand? And don’t think you won’t be punished just because you got what you wanted.”

  Shaking his arm free, Collin hurries off to the Poonchwallas’ motel without a backward glance.

  NO ONE IS AT the motel reception desk. Collin presses the bell. After a minute Mrs. Poonchwalla comes out, her orange sari whispering, her long gray braid grazing her butt.

  Gita can’t come out; she’s busy doing schoolwork in her room. “Maybe tomorrow you’ll see her,” Mrs. Poonchwalla says kindly. “Are you and your father going to the fair?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’ll look for you there.”

  She withdraws behind a beaded curtain. Peeking after her, he can see her padding barefoot down the hallway into the kitchen. Collin waits a few minutes, then slips into the corridor.

  He peers into the kitchen. Gita’s mother bends over the stove, her elbow working hard. The swish-swash of a spatula, the sizzle of steam, and the whirr of a portable fan cover the sound of Collin tiptoeing past the doorway behind her.

  At Gita’s door it occurs to him: her mother might hear if he knocks. He tries sending a mind-message.

  He hears a toilet flushing. Gita comes out of the bathroom into the corridor. When she sees Collin, her eyes open wide. Putting her finger to her lips, she pulls him into her bedroom and quickly shuts the door.

  His eyes take a moment to adjust to the darkness. Her curtains are drawn; the room is lit only by the blue screen-saver on Gita’s laptop, and some candles set before the shrine to Gana. He smells sweat and leftover skunk.

  When he tells her his plan, Gita’s eyes glow with approval. “Yes! We can do this.”

  “But what do we do when we get to Jane’s hiding place? How do we fight Shaarinen?”

  “We’ll ask the goddess.”

  A soft knock at the door: “Gita?”

  Motioning toward her bed, Gita lifts the dust ruffle so he can hide underneath. Collin curls up alongside their summer stash of stolen items: the Episcopalian psalter, the Jewish blue-and-white braided candle, the Catholic altar bells, the Calvary of Holy Innocents tambourine, the Meltzers’ tiki torch.

  He can see Gita’s bare feet retreat as she goes to the door. Opening it a crack, she speaks with her mother in their language.

  Hearing the door close, he crawls out. Gita is swallowing some pills with a glass of water.

  “The doctor says I have an ulcer. Just another one of the trials a warrior has to go through. Did you bring an offering?”

  “I couldn’t. Dad doesn’t let me do anything except what he wants.”

  “Never mind. Let’s write our questions.” Gita tears a page from her school notebook in two.

  They each write a question, then fold the paper into small squares, placing their petitions on the shrine amid the candles. Gita turns off the light so they can meditate before Gana.

  Collin stares into the flame, repeating the prayer he has learned—”Tell Me O Gana”—until the goddess answers his question.

  Afterward he turns to Gita. “I asked if my plan would work and she said, ‘Yes.’ What did you get?”

  “I asked her how we destroy Shaarinen. She said: ‘By blade or by fire.’”

  Gita has an idea for the fire. And Collin can steal his dad’s machete, so that takes care of the blade.

  “Tell me again what will happen after we complete our mission.” He never gets tired of hearing her tell the story.

  When the battle is won, Gita and Collin and the other avatars scattered about the planet will shed their color. Their skin will go white, then transparent, then invisible. They will walk among the people unseen, potent and infinitely wise.

  CHAPTER-TWENTY-SIX

  I am Jane Pettigrew.

  Her words echo in Brett’s mind. They are all he has to go on.

  This was my home almost two centuries ago.

  Now that he has lost the Jane he knew, the only thing left is to delve into the past, and find the Jane he doesn’t know.

  With Elsa’s help, Brett turns up a record of Jane Pettigrew’s baptism in 1833, at the Unitarian church.

  Child: Jane Amelia Pettigrew. Parents: Benjamin and Sarah Pettigrew.

  Later the same year, the registry reports Sarah’s funeral. Elsa sighs, “Poor girl, to lose her mother so young. At any rate, now we know the Pettigrews were Unitarians.”

  They wade through the next twenty-three years of the Unitarian registries but find only Benjamin Pettigrew’s funeral in 1854. No weddings for Jane or her sister Rebecca; no funerals for them either. By 1860, all the Pettigrews have disappeared from the Graynier census.

  What happened to the two sisters?

  What if Jane married someone from another church, and left the Unitarians?

  Brett resigns himself to flipping through the other five churches’ records. The leather bindings powder his fingers with dust which coats his sinuses as he turns the stained pages, poring over the spidery script that reports arrivals and couplings and final departures of the human faithful.

  There is no trace of the Pettigrews in any of them.

  He has always assumed reincarnation to be horseshit, a way for nobodies to boast they used to be somebodies. You can claim you were King Arthur or Cleopatra in a former life, and who can prove otherwise? Funny how no one ever says he was a garbage collector, or an aardvark.

  Fragments come to me and I don’t understand them. But they have a certainty—I know them to be true, as I know my name is Jane and I was born in Graynier. If they come not from my memory, then where?

  How could she know which was the Pettigrews’ house? The detective said she had lived in the autistic facility for most of her life. Where did she get her memory of a wall, and the name Quirk?

  Elsa pipes up from the corner where she is studying local cemetery records: “I’ve found the headstones!”

  She brings the book over to Brett’s table, pointing out the entries. He reads the first: “Pettigrew, Sarah. Location: Beacon Unitarian Cemetery. Description: marble monument, side border of vines, flowers, and fruit, crowned by weeping winged head. Inscription: ‘Sacred to the memory of Sarah Mayhew Pettigrew, our cherished wife and mother, born in 1807 and died on February 6, 1833. I am the resurrection and the life/ He that believeth in me/ Though he were dead/ Yet shall he live.’”

  Underneath Sarah’s entry is “Pettigrew, Benjamin. Location: Beacon Unitarian Cemetery. Description: simple granite slab. Inscription: ‘In memory of Benjamin Leviticus Pettigrew who died March 21, 1854 aged 48 yrs. Calm & resigned I do give over/ My life for one that shall never end/ Death has no terrifying power/ To those who find in Christ a friend.’”

  Turning the page, he sees the last listing is Rebecca. “No headstone for Jane?”

  “I’m sorry, dear. Perhaps she moved away to live with relatives, after her father and sister died. But go back and look at Rebecca’s entry, because there’s something odd about it.”

  He returns his eyes to the page. “Pettigrew, Rebecca. Location: Crompton Field plot. Description: sandstone slab, broken at base. Inscription: ‘Rebecca Pettigrew, died April 1854, aged 24.’”

  Brett looks up at Elsa inquiringly. “What’s strange about it?”

  “Rebecca’s headstone isn’t in the Unitarian cemetery along with her parents. There was no funeral recorded in the church registry, either. S
he’s in Crompton’s Field, where they buried the orphans, the servants and shanty workers. To be in Crompton’s Field, you were poor, or an outcast of some kind.”

  He doesn’t care about Rebecca. “But what about Jane?”

  “I believe we’re at a dead end on Jane Pettigrew.” Closing the book, Elsa rubs her eyes, smudging her mascara into ghoulish whorls. “Is there a reason for your curiosity about this particular person?”

  Because I love her. “She’s, like, a distant relative.”

  She glances at her watch. “I’m afraid it’s closing time.”

  Dispirited, Brett follows Elsa to the door as she locks up.

  “I’m still curious about Rebecca’s death,” she says as she lets him out. “I think I’ll have a look at Doctor Pincus’ journals. He was both doctor and coroner back then, and he cared for nearly everyone in Graynier. He made notes about all his cases, so maybe there’s some mention of the Pettigrews. Leave me your number and I’ll call you if I find anything.”

  A FOOL’S ERRAND.

  “Well, that was a wasted day,” Brett says on the drive home.

  Collin, riding beside him in barbed silence, is even further beyond his reach than when they left Connecticut. Brett feels a growing contrition; he has squandered their summer.

  At dinner he tries to engage his son, chattering inanely about software and sports. The boy, staring at his plate of takeout ribs, doesn’t even bother to grunt.

  “Maybe we should use our last days together to take that fishing trip I promised you.”

  “I don’t like fishing.”

  “How do you know if you never tried it?”

  “‘Cause I know.”

  Right back where they began.

  Collin rises abruptly, takes his plate into the kitchen. Brett hears water running in the sink, then the clank of the plate as the boy places it in the dishwasher.

  I’ve lost everyone now, Brett thinks. The two Janes, and my son.

  “Dad?” He feels the kid’s hand on his shoulder.

  He looks up. Collin’s brown eyes are round and sweetly supplicating.

  “Can you take me to the fair tomorrow?”

  Even in the short time that’s left, they could change things around, Brett thinks. He needs to give the boy his full attention.