by Alex Gordon
She steadied eventually. Slid the drawer back into its slot, then pulled out another. A corner drawer, impossible to see unless she pushed up the lid of the desk all the way, too small to hold much of anything. But it rustled as she pulled it out, as something inside moved.
Leaves? She fingered the blackened, withered things that filled the compartment, so desiccated that they crumbled at her touch. Potpourri? She sniffed, and winced at the faint foul stink of cat box. Could potpourri rot? Apparently.
She carried the drawer into the kitchen and tipped the leaves into the trash. As they tumbled, a flash of red caught her eye—she picked through the mess of smelly vegetation, food containers, and coffee grounds and retrieved the thing. It turned out to be a twist tie, worked into an odd shape, a circle centered with an X.
Lauren smiled. For as far back as she could remember, her father had fiddled with blades of grass or bits of string or wire. He would stuff the twists and knots in his pockets, then forget about them until they liberated themselves in the washing machine, tying up the sheets and towels or snagging favorite sweaters.
Someday, John Reardon, Mom would say as she inspected the latest damage. Someday you’re going to break something you can’t fix.
Lauren rinsed the circlet in the sink, then dried it, straightening the places where the wire had bent. She tried to remember whether she had ever seen that particular configuration before, but among all the shapes and braids and knotted lengths she had seen her father fashion over the years, it was one she could not recall.
She held it up to the light, tilting it one way, then the other. Then she put it in her pocket and returned to the living room. The music had ended, silence filled the gap and settled like a weight, and she wondered if she should have accepted Katie’s offer of refuge after all.
She walked to the front window and twitched back the curtain. Fog had settled thick as smoke, rendering the glow from streetlights diffuse and pale yellow as the moon through cloud, altering cars and buildings into darkened shapes that might have been man-made or other things entirely. Rocks. Cliff faces. Trees. Every so often, what wind there was caught the fog and sent it swirling, like dancers across a stage. Here was where the tales of ghosts began. In mist and wind, memories of the grave still fresh in the mind.
Lauren forced a laugh to break the silence. Maybe she should have majored in English lit, left the business world behind and studied all those rambling poems of highwaymen and wronged women and vengeful spirits. She hugged herself as she squinted into the gloom and picked out the flower planters and shrubs, the wet gleam of wheel rims and bumpers. Dull reality. Safe harbor for an anxious soul.
Then she caught movement, the shifting of a dark shape. A man, face rendered indistinct by the haze, his clothes smears of dulled color. Jared? It would have been like her ex to wait until everyone had left to pay his respects. Except that Jared slouched and ambled like someone without a care in the world. Whoever this was, tension wrapped around him like the mist. He paced beside one of the cars, then stopped and stood in front of it, arms folded, facing straight ahead.
Then, slowly, he turned his head toward her.
Lauren stepped back, let the curtain fall. But even though she no longer saw the man, she sensed his stare through the murk, knifing through the glass and brick and plaster. She crept to the door and rattled the knob, tested the lock, activated the alarm. Then she ran from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen, checked that windows had been closed and locked. In the kitchen, she latched the back door, her hand shaking so that it took her four tries to fit the chain into the slide.
Then she stilled, and closed her eyes. Listened, but heard nothing except her own rough breathing.
What the hell’s wrong with me? The poor guy had probably stopped by to pick up his girlfriend or collect his kids for a long weekend. Idiot. She counted to three, then walked to the front door, deactivated the alarm, and unlocked the locks. Took hold of the knob and twisted, yanked the door open, and walked out into the cold—
The man had gone. Lauren scanned the parking lot, the entries to nearby condos, but saw no one.
She walked to the edge of her courtyard and then across the short stretch of lawn to the parking lot. Mist brushed her face, condensed on her skin, trickled like cold sweat. She stopped in front of the car, an older-model Accord, and noted the license number, the UW parking permit. Bent to touch the place where the man had stood, the damp and filthy asphalt.
After a few minutes, Lauren returned to her condo. She opened the curtains and turned up the lights, then grabbed her wineglass on the way to the kitchen and dumped the dregs into the sink. Debated making coffee, and settled for herbal tea. The last thing in the world she needed was caffeine.
As she waited for the kettle to come to a boil, she paced, turned the faucet on and off, stared out the kitchen window into the dark. Felt something in her hand, and saw that she had dug the wire circlet out of her pocket without realizing it, squeezing it so tightly that it left its imprint in her palm. She massaged the thing between her fingers, and slowly calmed. She just needed something to do with her hands. Like father, like daughter.
LAUREN WENT TO bed early, tossed and turned for an hour or so. Got up and walked to the dresser and opened the top drawer, and poked through the prescription bottles in search of something that would help her sleep.
Correction. The sleeping part had never been the problem.
Dreams. She had lied to Katie. Her dreams didn’t come and go. This time, for the first time in years, they came and stayed.
Lauren emptied one of the pill bottles atop the dresser, then counted the tiny green tablets and pushed them into piles. Distraction. Give her brain something to work on in the present so that it would leave the past alone.
Except that it didn’t work. Memories bubbled up from the depths of repression, burned into her brain like scars. Her cries in the night. The pound of footsteps, and the blinding flash as her bedroom lamp flared to life. Her mother’s worried face.
Monsters, Mommy! The only word her six-year-old self could think of to describe the grayed faces that grinned at her with blackened mouths, and reached for her with clawlike hands.
There are no monsters here, honey. Angela Reardon, the circles beneath her eyes as dark as her hair, opening the closet door and poking at the clothes. Look.
They’re not in there, Mommy—they’re in here. And Lauren slapped her head over and over, as though she could drive the faces away if she hit herself hard enough.
And through it all, her father stood in the doorway, slack-faced, as though the bottom had just dropped out of his life.
Visits to doctors followed. Psychiatrists. And they had been investigated—Lauren realized it years later. Too many unexpected visits by serious women with clipboards. After one visit, Lauren eavesdropped on her parents as they went over each question they had been asked, and wondered if they had given the right answers. Then her mother cried. They’ll take her away. Our baby.
One of the serious women dropped by the following week, and asked to speak with Lauren. As they sat on the porch steps, Lauren took the woman’s hand as she answered her questions. When they finished, the woman spoke to Lauren’s parents. She wouldn’t be back, she said. Everything was fine. No one would visit them again. Lauren’s mother wept with relief. But her father took her aside and knelt before her.
What did you say to her, Lauren?
What she wanted to hear.
But how did you know what she wanted to hear?
I just knew, Daddy. I held her hand, and I just knew.
And John Reardon had stared at her as he had when she told him about the monsters. You’re a good girl, he said after a time as he held her close. I love you very much. He stroked her hair, one soft sweep after another, and she fell asleep in his arms. Sweet, dreamless sleep.
Maybe the relief she sensed from her parents reset something in Lauren’s head. Whatever the reason, the dreams stayed away for years, all through grade school,
high school, college. Then they returned after Angela Reardon’s death, this time a little different. Sometimes a roaring blaze, orange and gold against a clear blue sky. Other times, falling snow, the most vivid scene of all. Lauren would feel the sting as the flakes struck her skin, the spreading chill as they melted.
Lauren opened another bottle and dumped out the pills. Mottled brown and orange this time, like tiny bundles of dried moss. She blamed grief for the return of the dreams. Work pressures. Jared. And now Dad. She could choose her own doctors now, and they proved about as useful as the ones her parents had taken her to. Talking about the images and what they might mean—the grasping hands, the faces—didn’t help. Neither did medication. The only useful thing she ever heard had come from another patient, an older woman she met in one of the waiting rooms. They had talked about their reasons for seeking help, and the woman had patted Lauren’s hand.
Dreams are our mind’s way of telling us that something is wrong.
“Be nice if they could be more specific.” Lauren paged through the inserts that had come with the various prescriptions, searching for some magic treatment that had eluded her to that point. But the drugs all seemed more likely to cause nightmares than stop them, so she swept the pills back into their bottles, then wrapped the bottles in their paper instructions like so much garbage. Stuffed them back in the drawer, and settled for a cup of herbal tea.
That night, she dreamed of fire, and a man’s shadowed face watching her from the flames.
Lauren awoke before sunrise. Showered. Dressed in clothes suitable for rooting through attics and closets, khakis, a faded denim shirt, and beat-up deck shoes. Made coffee, then stood at the front window, mug in hand, and surveyed the parking lot, the morning comings and goings of her neighbors. The Accord still sat in the same space it had occupied the previous night, but soon a man emerged from a nearby unit and headed for it. A blond, short and paunchy with a plodding gait, radiating all the tension of cooked spaghetti.
Lauren watched the man toss a briefcase and suit coat into the backseat and drive off. So much for her connection between the car and last night’s watchful visitor.
She yawned. Her man in the flames had hung around for most of the night. At times, he even attempted to speak, but his voice emerged muffled, indistinct. He tried to tell me something. Was it a threat? A warning?
Dreams are our mind’s way of telling us something is wrong.
Lauren raked a hand through her hair, a chin-length bob gone shaggy from neglect. “Maybe he was trying to tell me that I need a haircut.” Before her father’s funeral, the idea of having her hair styled had struck her as frivolous, disrespectful. But now it seemed exactly the right thing to do.
Lauren dug out her phone and ran a search, found a downtown salon recommended by friends, and made an appointment. She would stop by her father’s house, collect his papers, and drop them off at the lawyer’s office. After her haircut, she would stop by Katie’s store and drag her to lunch.
Lauren traded her shabby shirt for a brown cashmere pullover. Grabbed a raincoat. Katie had been right all along—she needed to break out of the dark place she had inhabited these past few weeks and reenter the world.
IN CONTRAST TO the bustle of the U-District, Wallingford proved an island of quiet. Lauren drove along streets lined with close-packed homes, some with their original plain frame exteriors, others modernized and landscaped into architectural showplaces.
Her parents’ home fell in between. It had been painted the year before, cream with dark taupe trim. Over the years, John Reardon had sanded and stained the porch his favorite light oak shade, replaced the doors and windows, installed brick steps in front and a flagstone patio and small greenhouse in the postage-stamp backyard. Angela Reardon had planted flowering trees and shrubs, bulbs and bushes, so that in the spring the steeply banked front yard turned into a waterfall of hydrangea and dogwood, rhododendron and golden elderberry and rose. At the display’s height, neighbors ferried houseguests to gaze in awe, while passing motorists stopped and took photographs.
Three-quarters of a million, I would say, Frank Welles told her the day she first met with him after Dad’s death. Assuming you want to sell it, of course. They paid off the mortgage years ago.
Lauren pulled into the short driveway, got out of her silver Outback, waved a greeting to a curious neighbor. Peered through the one-car garage’s narrow window at Dad’s old green Forester, two hundred fifty thousand miles and counting, nestled within. Then she walked up the steps to the porch, past the dormant shrubs and winter-drab grass. Collected the mail from the box alongside the door, sorted out the business letters, and dumped the holiday catalogs and other junk into the recycle bin.
As she inserted the key into the lock, she hesitated. She had not been to the house since the day before the funeral, and her visits to that point had consisted of quick dashes in and out to collect her father’s clothes, toiletries, documents for Frank Welles.
She opened the door, lingered in the entry, listened to the lonely silence of an empty house. The suitcase containing her father’s effects rested on the floor next to the couch, the hospice welcome packet a bright blue splotch on the coffee table.
Lauren closed the door. Checked her watch. She had an hour until her hair appointment, just enough time to grab the receipts and drop them off. She simply had to go downstairs, collect them, and leave.
Instead, she walked around the living room, stopped before the framed photographs that hung on walls and rested on tabletops, and studied them as if for the first time. Her kindergarten class. Candid shots at the beach, at picnics, in the stands at a Mariners game. Her graduation from UW, fresh-faced in her cap and gown, bracketed by Mom and Dad.
And finally, her parents on their wedding day, looking impossibly young in seventies hippie chic. Angela Reardon, née Olivetti, in gauzy white, a ring of yellow roses in her black waist-length hair. John Reardon, steady eye on the photographer, in an open-necked white shirt topped with a leather vest, his hair a shoulder-grazing mass of dark ringlets.
He refused to wear a suit. Called them funeral clothes. Lauren’s mother would stand in front of the photo with a hand to her mouth, shaking her head as though still wondering how she survived that day. My papa was not happy. It didn’t defrost between them until you came along, and even then . . .
Lauren returned to her graduation picture. At some point in the intervening years, her father had made peace with funeral clothes. He had worn a charcoal-gray suit on that day, and looked quite dapper even though he had at some point unbuttoned his jacket and loosened his tie.
Lauren gave the photograph one last look. Then she sat on the couch, pulled a throw pillow onto her lap, and hugged it as memory tugged like a child’s hand on her sleeve. If she concentrated, she could sense trace aromas in the stale air. Sirloin tip and apple pie, the last meal she and her father cooked together, on the Sunday before he fell ill.
John Reardon had been quieter than usual that day, studying his late wife’s handwritten recipes as though for the first time. Every so often, Lauren would catch him staring at her, but before she could say anything he would turn his back and run the food processor or the garbage disposal, anything that made a noise loud enough to preclude talking. She sensed that something bothered him, but she didn’t push. He would tell her when he was ready, when the time was right.
“But then time ran out.” Lauren set the pillow aside and picked through the day’s mail, tucking the bill for a magazine and a bank statement into her handbag for delivery to Welles’s office. She then got up and headed for the basement. Down the wood plank steps, which squeaked and creaked underfoot. Opened the drawer of the first floor-to-ceiling cabinet, spotted the thick brown envelope tucked beneath a drill case, and grabbed it.
On her way to the stairs, she passed the old kitchen chair that had served as her perch years before. It looked even more battered now, the duct tape curled and stiff, her father’s favorite jacket slung over the seat b
ack. A rescue from a navy surplus store, weathered coffee leather, the once-rich coloring faded and scuffed. My southpaw jacket, John Reardon had called it, because the inside breast pocket was located on the right side, a natural fit for his left-handed self.
Lauren picked up the jacket and hugged it, then draped it over her arm. Smoothed the worn leather, and felt something hard beneath her hand. She rooted until she found it in that inner right-hand pocket, a small book, thin, the black leather binding worn to bare cloth in places, the pages edged in wine red.
Lauren checked the front cover and the spine for a title. She found nothing at first. Then she tilted the book toward the light and picked out the shallow ridges and curves of an ornate font, the scant flecks of gold leaf that were all that remained of the gilded embossing. Worked out the letters one by one. The words.
The Book of Endor
She opened the book to the inside front cover and found a printed name and date, the black ink faded to gray with age.
Matthew James Mullin
1975
A tissue-thin divider followed. Then came the title page:
The Book of Endor
As translated by Hiram Cateman
Master of Gideon, Illinois
In this the year of the Great Fire 1871
By the Lady
In her name
A few blank pages followed. Or more correctly, pages that would have been blank but for the drawings, tiny images expertly rendered. Pen-and-ink illustrations of plants and animals. Branches and trunks of trees. Ferns growing along the edge of a river.
Lauren sat down on the basement step. Her phone chimed, the hairdresser’s appointment alarm sounding. She turned it off.
