by Karen Hesse
No one looks after me now and there is no one for me to look after. I wonder how Celia is doing.
* * *
Every day more people straggle back. Next door the wife returns but not the husband. And then one of the two sons. They wait.
I wait, too.
And then I hear him. He steps gingerly up the attic stairs and peers around the corner with his wide green eyes. Romulus.
I can tell the moment he is certain of me. Suddenly his purr fills the room. I’ve never heard a cat squeal with joy, and yet that is the sound he makes as he leaps into my arms. He cannot get enough of my hands, my skin, my hair. He is breathing me in, tasting me with his whiskers, his tongue, his nose. Finally, he relaxes into me with a weight I never felt when I held Wynonna or Ashley. Though a tenth the size, he feels heavier even than Jerry Lee. He has the weight of a cat come home.
Romulus, dear, dear Romulus. How did you ever survive?
* * *
Back before all of this, Brattleboro, like an opal, was fire and light, ceaseless animation within a milky stone. The downtown brick buildings stood shoulder to shoulder on either side of Main Street. Protectively, the Connecticut River draped a sinuous arm around the entire community.
Once filled with pedestrians, Brattleboro resembled an embryonic, dewy-cheeked New York. There was Manfred the cross-dresser, always smiling, there were those in flannel shirts ten months of the year, and those perennially in Birkenstocks. There were cyclists in spandex and bikers in leather. There were the tattooed. And the ponytailed. There were kids hanging out near the parking garage. And kids hanging lights at the youth theater. There were lawyers in clunky winter boots and real estate agents first in line at the American Association of University Women book sale. There were poets sitting on milk cartons outside the food co-op. There were plumbers singing opera in the basement as they clanged on pipes, and cardiologists acting on local stages. There were homeless sheltered at church, and battered women sheltered in plain sight in neatly manicured neighborhoods. There were the walking dead, those human husks from the sixties, burned out on acid, who talked to themselves and haunted the streets at all hours of the day and night. There were those who would give you the shirt off their backs. And sometimes did. Right there on Main Street.
You couldn’t take more than a few steps without passing an artist, a writer, a musician. Sometimes tempers flared but mostly it was a peaceable kingdom.
Where are they all now?
Will Manfred ever wave from a float in the Fourth of July parade again?
I sit on the bare floor in the attic with a shard of mirror in my hand and the photo album, studying the faces of my relatives, comparing their features with my own in the ragged glass.
I feel them all crowding inside me.
If I angle the glass in the morning light I can see an aunt nod to me in the mirror. I can see my grandmother beckoning. A cousin sticks out her tongue at me and grins. My mother frowns at me disapprovingly.
“What?” I ask her. “What do you want from me?”
“Get out of the attic,” she says. “Go. Live.”
“Not until you come home,” I tell her. “You come home first. Then I’ll live.”
I’m being watched. I know the trouble is supposed to be over but I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being watched.
My mind wanders with crazy ideas, trying to understand why I am still alone. Have they stopped caring? Has the time away from me convinced my parents that I’m not worth returning to? And then it suddenly occurs to me that perhaps my parents are in no hurry to get back because they think I’m still safe in Haiti. Or maybe right now they are in Haiti themselves, trying to find me, to bring me home.
Yesterday, next door, the second son returned. The cries of joy reached me through the closed attic window, sang through the glass, filled me with a contagious elation. I am so happy for them.
Now they wait for their last, their only unaccounted-for member.
When will my parents arrive? When will it be my turn to celebrate?
I still can’t shake the feeling that I’m being watched.
The offerings at the Dumpster improve. Perhaps it’s a sign that things in general are getting better.
But things are not improving for me. I don’t know how much longer I can survive this floating, attached to nothing, to no one.
At the Dumpster there is this guy. I know him, I’m sure I know him, but I can’t think straight. My head feels so hollow, except for a drumbeat of pain marching through it.
In the night I hear someone enter the house. Quiet, unfamiliar footsteps, not the footsteps of my parents. Whoever is here is exploring, from the basement up. I remember Celia and the man who raped her. Have I been able to protect myself all this time, only to be assaulted now, in my own home? Clinging to Jethro’s bear, I shut myself into the secret room behind the attic wall.
Later, when all is still, I come out from my hiding place and move like a ghost down the stairs, through every room.
I discover the guy I saw at the Dumpster. He has curled up in the blanket on the floor in my room. He sleeps there. Romulus sleeps with him. I know him. Why can’t I remember how I know him? He makes me think of the boys in Haiti. I think maybe he is from Haiti.
He doesn’t frighten me, in fact I think he is a friend. I don’t challenge him. I don’t throw him out. I don’t even wake him. I am certain he won’t hurt me. But my brain will not cooperate. It will not reveal who he is. My skin hurts.
Soundlessly I climb back to the attic and enter the secret lair, pulling a blanket over my rattling bones. I’m suddenly so cold. So cold.
* * *
Sometime before dawn, lightning fills the attic with a white terror.
A thunderbolt claps so close to my head it deafens me. My heart sputters. I think I am going to die now. Alone.
My mother is not here. My father is not here. Romulus is not here. Celia is not here.
I wait for the lightning to touch its scorching finger to my throat.
The boy from Haiti opens the hatch to the secret room, exposing me fully to the storm.
“Who are you?” I scream over the crashing thunder.
“Julian.” He sounds quiet, calm despite the storm’s manic energy.
Julian. Julian! Not from Haiti. From the apartment across the street. Julian from Burundi.
“How did you find me in here?” Terror transforms my voice; it is as white as lightning.
“You have been screaming,” he says. And then he puts his arms around me. “You are burning up with fever,” he says.
I have been on fire for days, but suddenly, in Julian’s arms, the feeling of free floating comes to an end.
Julian makes a bed for me out of a pile of blankets and pillows and clothes. Over the next few days, he prepares meals for me. Gives me medicine. He never leaves me alone unless he’s going after something to make me better. It’s like my first days with Celia.
I start to recover. I wonder how Celia, after being so sick, got up and started walking again.
I can barely prop myself up without feeling utterly exhausted. Julian sits on the floor beside me, our backs against the wall. To pass the time we study my mother’s photographs in her published books, the ones I hid in the crawl space.
“Some of these images are so happy, others break my heart,” Julian says.
“Yes,” I agree. I’d never realized how many of my mother’s images depict pain and decay.
Julian is quiet for a moment, then gently he asks, “Was your mother sad, Radley? When I saw her she always smiled. Was that a mask?”
I remember my mother’s laugh. Even when I heard it over the phone it made my heart leap with joy.
“No,” I say. “My mother isn’t sad. But she understands sadness. We won’t look at these anymore if you’d rather not.”
“Please,” Julian says. “They help me.”
I push the book away. “They don’t help me. I don’t want her pictures. I want her. W
here is my mother?”
I rest my head against his shoulder.
“Why haven’t they come back yet, Julian?”
And he tells me.
“It was bad here from the moment the APPs took office. So many protestors. So many young punks. I do not know where they all came from. I do not think they were all from here.
“The National Guard and the police, together, could not handle it all. They were under orders to uphold the peace. But they could not be everywhere at once.”
Julian holds me as he talks. “A gang came after me, Radley. Not just me, everyone in our building. They knew about us, that so many of us came from other countries. They hunted us down. I was so frightened. I did not think such a thing could happen in America. Your mother, she heard us screaming. She came out of your house with her camera. I do not need to tell you how she was with that camera. Your father had been working around the side of your house. It took him a little longer to come out to the street. When he saw that we were being attacked, he tried to calm things down. But your mother would not stop taking pictures. The thugs yelled at her to quit. They threatened her. They swore at her. But she would not stop.
“One of them had a gun. He shot her.
“He did not know who she was, Radley. As she fell, your father came on like an enraged bull.
“The same boy, terrified now, fired again.
“He shot your father, too.”
“My parents?”
“For a moment, everything stopped,” Julian said. “They were only kids, Radley. Kids with guns. They stared at the bodies of your parents in the street. They forgot about us. And they ran away.
“By the time the police came there was nothing anyone could do.”
“When did this happen?”
“Late in April, I think. It has been hard to keep track of dates.”
By the time I left Haiti my parents were already dead. That darkened spot in the middle of Channing Street was the blood of my mother, the blood of my father.
I go out after Julian tells me these things.
I go out into the purple dusk.
I go out alone.
I touch the place in the street where my parents fell. I lie down and put my cheek there. Just there.
If someone drove up Channing Street right now my life would end … where the life of my parents ended.
But no one turns onto the street.
I lie there for ten minutes, twenty minutes, I don’t know how long, and no one turns onto the street.
Julian finds me there.
He lifts me and leads me back up the front walk and through the broken door.
Julian no longer lets me out of his sight. He moves me from the attic, back to my own room.
“I knew when you came back from Haiti, Radley. I saw the police look for you, to tell you about your parents.”
“Not to take me?”
“Not to take you. Why would they take you?”
Why would they take me …
“I watched you leave that night. I knew you were going. I wanted to follow you. I started to follow you. But I did not think you would want me along. I thought if I came it would make things more difficult for you.”
“So you’ve been here, living on this street all this time? How? How did you manage?”
“I come from a place where one must learn to survive. When your country started to break down, I hoped it would not last long. I hoped that law and order would be restored. And it has been. Mostly.”
“But how did you do it, how did you stay sane with no one to talk to?” I ask.
Julian shrugs, and it makes me think of Celia, and suddenly I break down.
My parents are gone. After all these months hoping to find them, they’re gone.
How can I still be here? How can anyone still be here when my parents are gone?
* * *
“You’ve been taking care of Romulus the entire time.”
Julian nods. “After your parents died … I came to your house. I took your mother’s wallet from the front hall so it would not be stolen…” Julian hands the wallet to me.
My mother’s battered black wallet. I always planned to buy her a new one. But I always changed my mind at the last minute, knowing how attached she was to the ratty old thing. She was funny that way. It suited her because it held everything she needed and still fit into her pocket. I slip it into my own pocket, wrap my fingers around it, and vow to carry it with me from now on, wherever I go. There is so much of my mother in it, so much of my memories of her in it.
Holding this thing my mother held, I feel the grief rise up again like floodwater; I sink into Julian’s arms.
“Romulus came to me the moment I entered the house,” Julian says softly. “He came home with me that night and has remained with me ever since.”
“Did you use my mother’s money to help pay for his care?”
Julian looks at me, puzzled. “I have not opened her wallet, Radley. It was not mine.”
* * *
I try to distract the persistence of my grief. I thought my world would end when Chloe died. But this is even worse. I ask Julian about Burundi. He does not wish to speak of it. That’s okay. I cling to whatever he does want to talk about. He is my life preserver. Julian understands, I think, the danger I’m in. The danger of drowning.
He asks me about Canada to get me talking. And slowly I tell him my story.
He loves best when I talk about Celia, and Our Lady of the Barn, and my excursions through the countryside.
Julian says, “Ah, Radley, to have had such an experience.”
“Ah, Julian,” I say back, “to have never had it.”
A fat envelope is pushed through the mail slot, through the door that Julian has repaired. It is not restored to the standards of my father, but the door is more or less in place. My father would understand.
The envelope sits for some time on the floor in the front hall.
Finally we open it.
Someone wants to buy the house. They are offering cash. The enclosed papers have been drawn up and signed by a local lawyer. They look in order.
Julian and I sit in the dark, the offer for the house between us.
“It’s a lot of money,” I say. “When I was in Haiti I dreamed of having this much money. It is more than enough to do everything I dreamed of.”
“But if you give up the house you will have nowhere to go,” Julian says.
“Oh, but I do have somewhere to go. And I’d like it if you’d come with me.”
I tell him about the pact Celia and I made.
“What about the rest of your family?” Julian asks.
“What family? My parents are gone.”
“Cousins, aunts, grandparents…”
Julian, perhaps, is thinking of his own family, left behind in Burundi.
“We didn’t have much in common before all of this. None of them have tried to find me. Celia is my family now. You. And Celia.”
We go out, hand in hand. We walk in the moonlight down to Veterans Bridge and look out over the Meadows. We walk along the railroad tracks, following the course of the river. We pick our way up Main Street, through the neighborhoods, up to the reservoir on Chestnut Hill.
“Can you give all this up?” Julian asks. “This has always been your home.”
It takes me a long time to answer. In the space between Julian’s question and my reply my life plays out inside my head. So many of the images are my mother’s, her photographs: Christmas in the house, walking in town after a snowstorm, sunsets over the Meadows. But so many more are my own: hanging out with Chloe, putting makeup on in the hall mirror, reading in bed. Memories wakened by Celia this summer in the games we played, in the stories we told. When the images finally end I realize my life here has ended, too. My parents are never coming back.
I nod. “I can give it up,” I say. “Can you?”
“It is not mine to give up. I am not even legal in this country anymore.”
I begin to laugh. “Is anyone legal in this country?”
Julian tilts his head back to look at the sky. His eyes glisten. His nearness brings me such comfort. I don’t love Julian. Not in the way I think he cares for me. I don’t think I ever can love Julian that way. But what I feel for him goes straight to my soul. It is much like the love I feel for Celia. A strange, deep, holy thing.
We stand for a very long while, side by side.
I will always feel haunted here, no matter how much time passes.
“Let’s sell it,” I say.
My father kept meticulous records. Regularly checks would arrive for my mother’s work. Each payment was recorded in my father’s elegant handwriting, each column filled and tallied.
The money went into several accounts, but after my parents were murdered, the APPs, through some obscure loophole, appropriated every penny of it.
Perhaps this new government will restore what was taken from me …
But I have no proof, no account numbers, no codes or keys. I saved my mother’s photographs, but not my father’s account books. It’s all gone.
At least I have my passport. At least I can prove I was their daughter. This, I think, and the proceeds from the house must be my legacy.
The things from the attic crawl space we transfer to a small storage unit at the edge of town. I’ve arranged with the bank to pay the rent on it indefinitely. Julian closes and locks the door on these precious few remnants from my old life. I am unable to do it myself.
When we finally go, I carry Jethro’s bear, my mother’s wallet, and a few changes of clothes. Julian carries Romulus. And whatever else he thinks we might need. We take a bus north to Newport with just the packs on our backs.
My parents always prided themselves on traveling light. They would be so pleased.
part four
