Embers

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  "It's hard to imagine him carrying a tiny rose in his pocket," Jane murmured, frowning. She was absolutely put off by the man.

  "No mystery about that; Aunt Sylvia must have been a client," her mother said as she dropped her Visa card on top of the tab. "She had to have needed help keeping up the property at the end."

  She signaled for a waiter to square up the bill. "Rain or not, I'm looking forward to seeing your Lilac Cottage. As I recall from an old photo, it's an adorable place with lots of shrubs and flowers. We'll have to be very clever marketing it, especially in this economy ...."

  "Hmmm." But Jane wasn't listening. Her attention was fixed squarely on the driver of the pickup, who'd rolled down his window and was yelling across to someone she couldn't see.

  "I want the burner, you moron!" he shouted. "Bring it over!" He threw the truck into gear and tore off down South Water Street.

  "Charming," Jane's mother remarked, slipping her credit card into her wallet.

  "People never shout in San Francisco?" Jane asked dryly.

  "Not where we live," her mother said without a trace of irony. "That's the trouble with an island: There's nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, from these types."

  Gwendolyn Drew was of the Miss Manners School of Snobbery. As far as she was concerned, you could be rich, or you could be poor. You could be educated, or you could be not. But you had better behave, or you were nothing at all. Jane smiled to herself, shook her head, and slipped on her coat. "Ready, Mother?"

  Chapter 2

  Lilac Cottage was a shambles. Jane had tried to prepare herself for the inevitable wear and tear that two years without an occupant can mean to a house. But she hadn't taken into account the savagery of Nantucket's storms, or the corrosiveness of its year-round fog. And she hadn't taken into account her aunt's reluctance to spend any of her savings on the property.

  She turned off the key to her rental car and sat, stunned, staring at the tiny two-story Gothic cottage, whose front door was nearly hidden by two massive holly trees flanking either side. Peeling paint, sagging gutters, missing roof shingles, rotted steps ....

  "This isn't the place," Jane said flatly. "I remember a long flagstone path that wandered through a high pergola covered with purple clematis, and there were green shutters all around, and a potter's shed off on the right, and ... and it was all much bigger."

  Her mother was more philosophical. "That was a quarter-century ago, darling. You were little. Things looked big. Still, I must admit it's been far more neglected than I thought. This will be a hard sell." A thought seemed to occur to her for the first time. "Poor Sylvia," she said softly, her hand resting on the car door handle. "She must've had to watch every cent."

  They got out of the car and began picking their way through the front lawn, which had the look of a mowed-down hayfield. Jane edged some of the dead grass aside with her foot.

  "See? Flagstone. I was right. And this," she said, pausing before a six-foot post leaning over what used to be the front path, "this must have been part of the pergola." She tried to push the post upright; it made a dull snapping sound at the base and fell to the ground.

  "Rotten," her mother said, stepping over it. "Do you have the key?"

  But Jane was still riveted to the spot, staring at the post as if it were a soldier felled in some hopeless battle against time. "I climbed up this pergola," she said in an awestruck voice. "I picked a bunch of clematis from the top and wove them into a purple crown for Aunt Sylvia ... and she let me unpin her hair and brush it out ... and I put the crown on her head."

  She looked around, dreamily, and said, "She sat on a wooden chair right there, next to the house, and the sun picked out the red that was left in her hair ... and she told me that hers was once the same color as mine ...."

  "Jane?"

  "I can't believe it's all gone," Jane said, still in a faraway voice.

  "The key?"

  Jane stared at her mother. "To what?"

  "Your future, ninny!" Jane's mother pointed a manicured finger at the front door. "Open it, dreamer," she commanded, laughing. "Before I grow as old as that post."

  Jane searched through the ring for a likely match to the old lock in the door and came up with it on the first try. She turned the tarnished brass knob and, after putting her shoulder to the heavy, sticking door, managed to swing it open. The two women stepped inside to a world of mildew and cobwebs.

  Gwendolyn Drew made a face. "God, it smells awful," she said, flipping a switch. When nothing happened, she went up to one of the low windows and flung open its moldy drapes. Weak, gray light spilled into what must have been a front parlor, revealing a boarded-up fireplace and a dreary collection of budget furniture standing on a carpet remnant of some indeterminate color.

  "Is there a Goodwill dropoff on the island?" was all Gwendolyn could think to say.

  "I don't know. This isn't at all what I remember," Jane said, walking around the room, disappointed that nothing in it reminded her of her aunt. "What happened to Aunt Sylvia's old stuff? She had such nice things."

  "Probably she sold them," her mother remarked, looking at the peeling ceiling with dismay. "What kind of nice things?"

  "Nothing fancy, but just, you know, nice. There was a slant-top desk I used to sit at to write you and Dad that summer ... it had pigeonholes and a secret compartment."

  Jane thought of the desk and sighed. "Well, this is too bad." Somewhere in the middle of the night she'd comforted herself with the thought that she'd haul that desk back to Connecticut and somehow reconnect with Aunt Sylvia.

  She followed her mother into the kitchen, which had little to recommend it: doorless cupboards, worn-out linoleum, a freestanding porcelain sink. In a little pantry adjacent, an ancient Frigidaire and a three-burner stove were crammed side by side under a high, tiny window. It was all as inefficient as could be.

  The two women crossed the hall and peeked into the bathroom.

  "Not as bad as the kitchen," Jane's mother decided. "Black and white deco tiles are a good, classic treatment. And clawfoot tubs are still in."

  Upstairs there were two small bedrooms which had casement windows and a cozy, steep-eaved charm. At the end of the hall was an even smaller room filled with boxes, some broken chairs, and the head and footboards of a small spindle bed.

  "I like the view," Jane said, looking over the top of a huge bare lilac just outside the window. "This would make a nice little office."

  "I think, more of a nursery."

  Jane closed her eyes and began counting to ten. "Mother — don't start."

  "Start what?" Gwendolyn asked blandly. "I wasn't talking about you."

  "Of course you were."

  They began to retrace their steps downstairs. "Well, can you blame me?" her mother asked in a plaintive voice. "Jane, you're thirty-three years old, and I don't see anyone anywhere on the horizon. Your sister — who, I might add, is five years younger than you are — has found herself a nice hard-working doctor and is soon to give birth to her second child."

  "Whereas I am —"

  "Not even dating, are you?"

  "Not in the way you mean."

  They stopped in the middle of the dingy kitchen, and as her mother exhorted her for the umpteenth time to shape up her life, Jane found herself scanning the open cupboards for some bit of crockery, a teapot, anything, to remind her of the summer she'd spent there when she was eight. She wanted so desperately to hold on to the memory of her aunt.

  "Darling, I'm only going on about this because I love you very much, and I don't want —" Her mother sighed, took her by her shoulders, and said, "It's true, what they say: Youth really is wasted on the young. Jane, don't you see? Falling in love takes time. Building a family takes time. You act as if time were some endless resource you have."

  "I haven't met the right man, Mother," Jane said absently. "I'm not going to force a relationship where one doesn't want to grow."

  Gwendolyn Drew sighed again, heavily, and Jane noticed almost for the
first time the lines that ran from her finely shaped nose to the corners of her usually animated mouth. And her gray hair, so much more than before. Her mother was no longer young ... fifty-nine? Was it possible?

  Her mother seemed to be reading her mind. "All right, I admit it: Yours isn't the only biological clock I'm worried about. Your father and I are getting on; this is our time for grandchildren. You know how much we adore little Jonathan."

  Grateful at least for her mother's candor, Jane smiled and shook her head. "I need more reason than —"

  "Of course I know that. You can't rush these things; haven't I just said as much? But in the meantime, shouldn't you be doing something more with your life? Being a graphic designer was very nice, but the advertising industry isn't going to bounce back for a long, long time. Aren't you just, well, treading water?"

  She seemed to be choosing her words with infinite care. "I suppose what I'm saying is, it's fine if you take a career track. It's fine if you take the mommy track. Our great fear is that you're not taking either track."

  It began to dawn on Jane why her mother had really detoured to Nantucket: it was to jump-start her daughter's flagging ambition. "Well!" Jane said with a false, bright cheerfulness. "It beats having a heart attack trying to do both tracks at once."

  But her mother was right, and Jane knew it. She'd become so discouraged by the job market in the last few months that she'd stopped looking. If that free-lance assignment hadn't fallen into her lap .... She gave her mother a tremulous smile and put out her arms and hugged her.

  "Anyway, here we are, trying to figure out how to sell this house. Am I on the right track now?"

  Gwendolyn Drew kissed her daughter on the cheek, wrapped her arm around her waist, and whispered in her ear, "I'd rather have the grandchild."

  "You're hopeless!" Jane said, swatting her mother's shoulder.

  "True," her mother admitted with a sigh. "But lately I've been wondering more and more: do you want children, or don't you?"

  "How can I know, if there's no one in my life to have children with?" Jane wailed.

  Her mother gave her a quick, sympathetic squeeze. Having declared a truce, the two of them went arm in arm into the last of the rooms together; and in the last of those rooms, Jane found what she was looking for.

  It was large, bare-windowed, and even on a wet day like this one, filled with light. A cherry-manteled fireplace dominated one wall. The windows opened to a view of gently rolling terrain, dotted with bayberry bushes and low evergreens. Outside, a soft gray fog suffused everything, fuzzing the edges, intensifying the greens. Jane suddenly remembered that a tiny old burying ground nicked one corner of the property.

  The room itself was attractively furnished: a Persian rug, an Empire bed covered in kilims, an old brass table lamp. The whimsical iron plant stand was still there, and the old rocking chair — Jane remembered it well, having spent afternoons petting the cats in it — and best of all, the slant-top oak desk, tucked quietly in the corner. Bookcases on each side of the fireplace were still half-filled with books, as if Sylvia Merchant had been fully planning to come home on sunny weekends.

  "I remember this room," Jane cried. "I remember the fireplace. It was August, and we couldn't have a fire, and I prayed for just one night of frost ....

  "Look at this — some sort of old portable kerosene heater. I wonder if the furnace even works," Gwendolyn mused. "Oh dear; that'll cost you."

  The old and faded wallpaper was exquisite, a restrained floral of ivory, rose, and green. Jane remembered tracing the tendrils of ivy with her mind's eye as she sat at the desk and struggled to write clever notes to her mother and father. It all came rushing back, her connection with the place.

  "It's obvious that Sylvia retreated with her favorite things to one-room living," Jane's mother said thoughtfully, stroking a soapstone figurine of a cat that sat on a side table. "I've seen it happen before," she added. She wandered over to a small inlaid table that stood next to the Empire bed. "It's an economizing gesture ... a last, desperate attempt to parcel one's resources ...."

  Suddenly she stiffened. Her voice coiled tightly around a gasp. "Tarot cards. So she was some kind of witch!"

  "Witch? What witch?" Jane walked up to the gaming table and stared at the pack of symbol-filled cards arranged across the tabletop. "Do witches use tarot cards?" she asked, amused by her mother's overwrought reaction. "I thought only psychics did."

  "Well, whoever," Gwendolyn said testily. "It just shows that your father and I did the right thing, keeping you away from her."

  The bemused look faded from Jane's face. "What do you mean — keeping me away?"

  Her mother made an impatient sound. "What do you think I mean? When you got back from your summer on Nantucket, your head was filled with paranormal gibberish. All you could talk about was ghosts and goblins. It frightened your father and me half to death. We decided to ... well, discourage ... any further association between Sylvia and you."

  She picked up a card with distaste and tossed it back on the table. "And I can see now, we did the right thing."

  Missing pieces to one of the puzzles of Jane's life suddenly fell into place. Her parents' insistence that she begin attending summer camp; her letters to her aunt that went unanswered; her mother's vague explanations for her aunt's aloofness — suddenly it all made sense.

  "You kept me away from Aunt Sylvia because she told me ghost stories? But I don't even remember them!"

  "Of course not; we stopped things in time."

  "You can't be serious! I don't believe it — Aunt Sylvia would have said something when I began visiting her in the nursing home."

  "We had asked her not to."

  Yes. It all made sense.

  "This is — how could you?" Jane said in a shaking voice. Her mother shrugged unhappily. "We did what we thought was best for you at the time, Jane. Maybe we were right, and maybe we were wrong. But you were such an impressionable little girl. Anyway, how could we know that Sylvia was going to leave you her house?"

  Exasperated, Jane threw up her hands and let them fall with a flop at her sides. "That's not the point! Aunt Sylvia was left alone all those years —"

  "I know, I know," her mother said, wincing. "But what's done is done. It's always easy to — for goodness' sake! There's the fellow in the pickup, driving right through your yard!" She nodded out the window at the dark-green truck marked J & J LANDSCAPING AND NURSERY that was speeding past the side of the house.

  It was a transparent ploy, but the distraction worked. "That's not my — Aunt Sylvia's — land. It's the neighbor's land," Jane said, feeling angry and contrary.

  "Oh, yes; I see that now. It's a nice property. The house has been done over beautifully. Who lives there?"

  "Apparently some New Yorker who uses it on weekends," Jane said stiffly. "He has a sister living there at the moment."

  "And meanwhile, Mr. Oak Tree has disappeared," Gwendolyn said, peering through one side of the window. "Do you suppose there's a shortcut across the property next door? That could be very annoying — at least, until Mr. Oak Tree gets his muffler fixed."

  "Mother, will you stop obsessing on real estate and just —"

  "Just what? Apologize?" Gwendolyn Drew shook her head sadly and fixed a sad, pale blue gaze on her daughter. "Wait until you have an eight-year-old, darling. If she came back from someone's house with stories of hauntings — if she woke up soaking wet from nightmares she was too frightened to recall — what would you do?"

  Jane compressed her lips and lifted her chin up. The truth was, she didn't have a clue. She'd never had an eight- year-old.

  "I just wish I'd known," was all she could think to say.

  ****

  Jane drove her mother to the airport in moody silence. Her mother, who did not believe in coaxing people out of moods of any kind, sat amiably beside her, ready to chat if the need arose. But the day had been an overwhelming one for Jane. With a melancholy hug she put her mother aboard the commuter back to Bo
ston.

  After that, Jane returned directly to the Jared Coffin House where she was staying and borrowed a copy of the Yellow Pages. By six o'clock she'd been able to cajole a plumber, an electrician, and even a roofer into meeting with her the following day, Friday. Things were going well; her spirits began to lift.

  Jane slept better that night, and by the time the sun finally poked its nose over the horizon, she was putting away a big breakfast at the inn. Her first stop was at the hardware store, where she bought a couple of smoke alarms. Her next stop was at the A&P, tucked hard by the harbor, where she picked up cleaning supplies, food, candies, and an Igloo cooler. After that she bought a pair of overalls and a workshirt, and after that, a bottle of Bermuda rum. She was ready to take on Lilac Cottage.

  By all rights Jane should have been depressed when she saw the cottage in bright morning sun: there seemed to be even less paint and more weeds than she remembered from the day before. But even in its state of forlorn shabbiness, the cottage beckoned to her. Maybe it was the fond memory of her summer there, or maybe it was her natural desire to put things right; whatever the reason, Jane found herself standing in the middle of the mowed-down lawn, hugging herself with anticipation.

  It has so much charm, so much potential. It may not be the biggest cottage, but it's in a wonderful location. And it's so sweet. You can tell it wants to be friends. You can just telL

  She swung around, searching for the ocean that she knew was out there not far from where she stood. But the house was on low land; there was no water view. It didn't matter. She inhaled a lungful of cold salt air, her chest expanding from the effort. Now this was living, she thought, grateful simply to be alive.

  It was at that exact, precise moment of gratitude that Jane found herself slammed violently in the back, so hard that she went sprawling on the soggy grass in front of her. Shocked and winded, she rolled over on her elbows and found herself staring at the massive head of a dog — or some cross between a dog and a mastodon — that was hovering over her. Drooling.