Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  FIVE

  Angell Street

  E mmie is sitting on the floor in her bedroom, her bedroom in Providence, home again after the three-hour train ride from Manhattan. They took the Acela Express, because it was so much faster, but the trip still seemed to take at least twice as long as usual. Sadie hardly spoke the whole way, and Emmie stared out the window at the countryside and the towns and the train stations rushing past. Somewhere in Connecticut, the sky turned stormy and dark; the clouds were like mountains piling up to crush the world. When they finally reached the Providence station, Deacon was there waiting for them. He looked worried and annoyed, but he hugged her tight, kissed her cheek and told her he’d missed her and was glad she was back so soon.

  Home again, home again, jiggety-jog.

  On Emmie’s CD player, Doris Day is singing “Secret Love,” and the volume’s turned up loud, but she can still hear Sadie and Deacon arguing. They’re downstairs in the kitchen, but their voices rise like warm air and get trapped in the heating ducts and travel all the way up to Emmie’s room. She’s shut the vent in the floor, but the voices are getting in anyway. She’s sitting near the window, between her bed and the window, with her back against the wall. I wish they’d stop, she thinks. I wish they’d just shut up and stop and Sadie would go back home, because that’s what she’s going to do, no matter how much they fight. And then she wishes she were in school, that it wasn’t a Sunday afternoon and it wasn’t winter break. Then they could fight all they wanted, and she wouldn’t have to sit here and listen to it.

  “It wouldn’t fucking kill you,” Deacon says, and then dishes clatter in the sink. “You already have the week off. You could spend it here.”

  “No,” Sadie tells him, the stubborn, angry tone she gets whenever Deacon suggests that she spend a night in the house with them. “You know I won’t do that. It’s not fair to ask me.”

  Emmie shuts her eyes and bites at her lower lip. They could fight outside, she thinks. They could walk down the street and fight all day long.

  “It’s fucking fair when you’ve already promised to take care of her this week.”

  “You know I won’t stay here. There’s no point talking about it, because you know I won’t.”

  Emmie’s already done the things she usually does whenever Sadie and Deacon are fighting. She’s straightened her room, putting everything in its place because it always seems that creating order ought to help, even though it never has yet. She made sure all her toys and games and clothes were exactly where they should be. She checked to see that all her books were in alphabetical order, and all her CDs, too. She pulled the covers off the bed and then remade it.

  “Hell, Deacon, I’ll pay for you to hire a sitter.”

  “I don’t want a sitter. You know I don’t want strangers in the house. You know how I feel about that.”

  Emmie opens her eyes again and stares across her room at the closed door to the upstairs hall. If it were a door to somewhere else, anywhere else, she’d open it and step across the threshold and shut it behind her, and then run far enough away that she couldn’t possibly hear Sadie and Deacon arguing. Emmie pulls a pillow off the bed—it doesn’t matter that it messes up the blankets and sheets, because all the order she made isn’t helping—and lays it over the heating vent. But she can still hear them.

  “You know how rough things have been at the shop,” Deacon says. “And you know damn well I’ve been counting on having this week to get caught up.”

  “She wanted to come home. What was I supposed to do? Tell her no?”

  “I know it’s news to you, but that is a fucking option,” Deacon says.

  On Emmie’s CD player, Doris Day finishes singing “Secret Love” and “Teacher’s Pet” begins. Emmie doesn’t like that song, and she thinks about getting up and skipping ahead to the next track. She also thinks about making the bed again, just in case, but she stays where she is, listening even though she doesn’t want to hear. Her stomach’s beginning to hurt, and she has to pee, but their voices would only be louder out in the hall, louder in the bathroom because it’s directly above the kitchen.

  “It was horrible,” Sadie says, bringing up the dead horse again, and Emmie chews her lip a little harder, chewing until she tastes a drop of blood. “That poor horse. Jesus, Deacon, I couldn’t make her stay in New York after that. I just couldn’t.”

  “That poor horse,” Emmie says, and now she’s thinking about the argument that morning between Hunter and Sadie. It was a fucking coincidence, Sadie said, and then there’d been the strange girl who wanted her to draw a bridge. It was getting hard to remember exactly what happened, and Emmie thinks she must have dozed off, listening to Hunter and Sadie, that she was tired and must have fallen asleep. She wishes she could fall asleep now.

  “The two of you could rent a car and drive up to Boston or something,” Deacon says. “You could spend the week in Boston.”

  “I can’t fucking afford a week in Boston or anywhere else, Deacon, and neither can you. And Emmie doesn’t want to be in Boston; she wants to be in her own home where she feels safe. It just about scared the hell out of her. Hunter said—”

  “Don’t fucking start with fucking Hunter Fontana,” Deacon says, and then it sounds like he drops a skillet or a pot or something. “Right now, the last thing I want to have to hear is how that goddamn dyke thinks I should be raising Emmie. And how is it you could afford to pay for a sitter, but not a week in Boston?”

  “Jesus, Deacon.”

  “You know, I’ve got enough to think about without the sage fucking advice of Hunter Fontana.”

  “It was a coincidence,” Emmie says to no one and shuts her eyes again. “Co-in-ci-dence,” she says, taking care to divide and separate each syllable from the other. “It was a coincidence.” And even over the noise of her father and stepmother arguing, even over Doris Day, Emmie can hear the terrible, dull shattering sound of the taxi hitting the mare. She remembers the sound perfectly, and she doesn’t think there’s much difference between hearing it and remembering it. I’m never going to forget that, she thinks. Not ever. She opens her eyes and goes back to staring at the closed bedroom door. The girl from the attic, the brown-skinned girl, is standing near the foot of her bed, but Emmie tries not to notice her. Maybe if she doesn’t say anything to the girl, she’ll go away.

  “That’s an awful racket,” the girl says. “Do they know you can hear them?”

  “I’m not talking to you,” Emmie tells her. “You’re not real, and I’m not talking to you.”

  “I like this music,” the brown girl says. “I’ve never heard such music. My father used to bring me music and play it on his Victrola. I liked ‘April in Paris,’ and ‘Mood Indigo,’ and—”

  “I’m not talking to you,” Emmie says again. “Go away.”

  “—‘When the Moon Comes over the Mountain.’ I like that one, too, but not as much as I like ‘Mood Indigo.’”

  Downstairs, Deacon curses and a glass breaks, and Sadie tells him to calm down and stop acting like a damned jackass.

  “I could sing it for you,” the brown girl offers, “if you’d like me to. I remember all the words.”

  “I know the words,” Emmie says, which is true because she has a CD with Billie Holiday singing “Mood Indigo,” one of the few CDs of hers that Deacon likes. “You don’t have to sing it to me, because I know it already.”

  “Besides, it would be very hard to hear me over this awful racket,” the girl says and frowns. “Do they know that you can hear them?”

  “I don’t know,” Emmie replies, though she suspects Deacon and Sadie know perfectly well how sound carries in the old house, and they just don’t care. “Maybe you should go downstairs and ask them.”

  “I would,” the brown girl says. “But they probably wouldn’t be able to see me or hear me. Your father might—”

  “I wish you’d shut up and leave me alone.”

  “—he could do that, a long time ago, hear and see things no
one else could see or hear. But he made it all stop. I guess he’d finally seen and heard enough.”

  Emmie stares at the girl. She seems solid, solid as anything else in the bedroom. She smiles at Emmie and sits down on the bed. The girl’s wearing the same black dress with the same stiff white collar that she was wearing the first time Emmie dreamed about her. Maybe that’s the only dress she owns, Emmie thinks and then silently scolds herself for thinking of the girl as if she were someone real.

  “I didn’t say you could do that,” Emmie says.

  “I was tired of standing,” the girl replies. “And it was impolite of you not to offer me a seat.”

  “Stop it!” Sadie yells at Deacon, and Emmie flinches.

  “Does he ever hit her?” the girl with brown skin asks.

  Emmie shakes her head, getting angry, and she tries to stop imagining this, wishing now that she could just go back to having to hear the argument downstairs. “No,” she says. “Deacon doesn’t hit us. He’s never hit either one of us. He doesn’t do that sort of thing, not even when he’s drunk.”

  “He’s drunk a lot,” the girl says.

  “Yeah, he’s drunk a lot. He’s an alcoholic, but he doesn’t hit us.”

  “The yelling’s just as bad, sometimes,” the brown girl says and stares past Emmie at the bedroom window. “You have a very fine house, Miss Emma Jean Silvey. I’ve never been inside this house before. My father once knew a man who lived across the street from here, a writer—”

  “Don’t you ever shut up?”

  “I spend a lot of time alone,” the brown girl says, still staring out the window at the house next door. “Well, that’s not precisely true, because mostly it’s not precisely time I spend alone. There’s only time whenever someone visits me.”

  “I know about being crazy,” Emmie says and glances past the girl at the closed bedroom door. If Sadie opened it, would she see the brown girl in her black dress, or would she see only Emmie sitting on the floor, talking to herself? “I’ve read books. You’re a hallucination. It’s probably because of stress, or maybe I have a brain tumor.”

  “You don’t look sick,” the girl says. “And I know that you aren’t insane.”

  “How could you possibly know that? You’re not even a real person.”

  Downstairs, the arguing has stopped. Someone slams a door, the front door, and Emmie figures that it’s probably Deacon going out for a walk, going out to cool off and maybe have a drink. He’ll probably walk for an hour or two, maybe follow Angell west to Hope Street, then turn north and walk all the way up to the Ladd Observatory, because he likes the benches there and being at the top of that hill. He’ll stay away from Thayer, because it’ll make him think of the shop, and she knows that’s one of the things he’ll be trying to forget. She’s sorry that she couldn’t have gone with him, not wanting to be in the old house right now, even with her hallucination for company and Sadie still right downstairs. But it’s a relief that they’ve stopped fighting, relief like the battered silence after a bad storm late at night, and she feels herself start to relax a little.

  “Something’s coming, Emma Jean,” the brown girl says. “Something terrible’s coming.”

  “What are you on about now?”

  The girl sighs and looks away from the window, looking down at Emmie. “I don’t know everything, and I can’t tell you everything that I know.”

  “Then what good are you?” Emmie asks her and goes back to watching the bedroom door.

  “I’ve found a few flaws, cracks that I think perhaps my father intentionally left for me to find, cracks that the ghouls don’t know anything about. I’ve come here to forewarn you, before it’s too late for augury to be any good to you…or to me.”

  Now Doris Day is singing “Qué Será, Será,” and the brown girl looks over her shoulder towards the stereo.

  “I read you somewhere,” Emmie says. “I made you from different characters in different books, from people in different movies. There’s no point trying to convince me otherwise. I’m not a moron, even if I’m going crazy.”

  “You’re not insane,” the girl says again. “And you have to trust yourself, because there’s going to come a time, very soon, when you can’t trust anyone else.”

  “My father can’t afford a shrink,” Emmie tells her and kicks at the side of the bed with her sock feet until the girl turns back around again.

  “I like that song,” the girl says.

  “It’s an old song. Haven’t you ever heard it before?”

  “I like it. It’s very pretty, but it’s not really the truth.” And then the brown girl sings along with Doris Day for a couple of lines—Whatever will be, will be. The future’s not ours to see—and her voice is high and sweet and reminds Emmie somehow of melting ice.

  “What’s not true about it?” Emmie asks her, wondering if Sadie will come upstairs, wondering if she’ll apologize for the argument and try to explain, hoping that she doesn’t.

  “I mean that there are some people, and some other things that aren’t people, who can see what will be, except there’s not only one thing that will be; there’s an infinity of things that might be. That’s what I mean.”

  “No one can see the future,” Emmie says, finally standing up, and she turns her back on the brown girl, who isn’t really there anyway, and stares down at the driveway and the evergreen shrubs and the wooden slat fence dividing their yard from the house next door, the house painted an ugly color like blue Play-Doh. There’s a robin down there, though it’s too early in the year for robins in Providence, and it hops about a bit before stopping and gazing up at her.

  “There’s so much that you don’t know, Emma Jean Silvey,” the brown girl says. “There’s so much you’re going to have to learn, and you’ll have to learn it quickly.”

  “I know too much already,” Emmie says. “I’m just a kid, and I know too much already.”

  “What’s coming, it doesn’t care how old you are.”

  “Nothing’s coming, and you’re not real. I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “I’m not a ghost,” the brown girl says. “I never claimed that I was a ghost.”

  “I still don’t believe in you,” and then the robin flies away, and Emmie looks up at the sky. There are clouds, the sort of clouds that usually mean snow, and she leans forward, flattening her face against the cold glass.

  “Later on you’ll believe,” the girl says, and Emmie sighs because this is getting tiresome. She wonders whether or not she should tell Deacon or Sadie about the girl.

  “My father’s not a bad person,” Emmie says, and her breath makes the window fog.

  “No,” the brown girl says. “No, he’s not. He’s only a man who’s seen things men weren’t meant to see. He’s only very tired and very lonely and very worried about you, Emma Jean. He loves Sadie, but he misses his wife very much.”

  “Shut up,” Emmie says, starting to cry even though she doesn’t want to, because she knows it isn’t going to make her feel any better about the poor dead horse or Sadie or Deacon or anything else. “You don’t know about Deacon, and you shouldn’t act like you do,” she says, turning around to face the brown girl, but she’s gone, and now there’s no one sitting on the bed. There’s a rumpled place in the blankets, a rumpled place where she imagined the brown girl sitting, but that might have happened when Emmie pulled the pillow off the bed.

  “Go away,” Emmie says, as if the girl were still there to hear her, as if she hadn’t gone away already. “Go away, and never come back.” And then Emmie lies down on the bed and cries until she finally falls asleep.

  And in her dreams, Emmie feels herself rise slowly up from the bed, her soul grown suddenly lighter than air, and she drifts untethered and insubstantial, passing straight through the bedroom ceiling into the shadows of the dusty, disused attic, and then through the pitched roof of the house on Angell Street. She lingers there a moment, a few feet above the chimney, and the sky rushes by overhead like traffic, clouds
filled with ice and snow and sudden patches of bright daylight. She isn’t afraid of falling, because it’s only a dream, though someone at school once told her that if you fall from a high place in a dream and hit bottom before you wake up, you’ll die. When she asked Deacon about it, he said it wasn’t true, that it was only a silly superstition, so she’s not afraid. She looks down and sees that the brown girl is watching her, is standing in the middle of Angell Street gazing up at her.

  I’m her balloon, Emmie thinks. I’m her balloon on a string. Though she can’t see a string tied to her anywhere. If she lets go, I’ll float away forever and be lost.

  All lost, lost, lost now… And those were not her thoughts, so Emmie thinks they must be the thoughts of the brown girl, because in dreams she can sometimes hear other people’s thoughts.

  The girl waves at her, and then a gust of icy wind carries Emmie away, south and east and up and up, over rooftops and treetops. And in only a moment she’s floated so high that she can see the Providence and Seekonk rivers going down to all the bays and islands and rocky coves before the ocean. And now she is getting scared, because this is much too high, even for a dream, and if she goes much farther, she might fall into the sea and drown, or end up floating away to some land so distant that she’ll never be able to find her way home again. She starts to call out for Deacon, but knows he won’t ever hear her, and the air’s so cold her words would only freeze and fall to earth like hailstones.

  The plink of words on sidewalks and lawns, a sentence heavy enough to shatter a windshield.

  “Wake up now,” she whispers, and Emmie’s beginning to wonder if she’ll float all the way out of the atmosphere and die in the near vacuum of space, looking down on the great blue ball of the world, when she realizes that she’s standing on a sandy beach near the water, and the brown girl is standing a few feet farther out, the waves lapping about her ankles, soaking her black-and-white-striped stockings. And the air has grown very warm, and a brilliant white sun blazes overhead. It isn’t winter here. Maybe, she thinks, it’s never been anything but summer here and never will be.