A Sound Among the Trees

by Susan Meissner

  The parlor became the center of the house’s mystery after that day, since Adelaide’s great-grandmother passed away a few months later, having never mentioned the echoes again, and her grandmother and mother would not discuss it. But Adelaide began to sense the rippling effect of time crumpled in on itself—echoes perhaps—the year her father died, and again much later when her husband Charles died, and again when dementia swallowed up her mother, all amid the whispered consensus of local gossipers and rumormongers that Holly Oak’s women were cursed because of what happened in the war. Because of what Susannah Page did.

  And didn’t do.

  In her adult years Adelaide found a stack of her great-grandmother’s letters to her cousin Eleanor Towsley of Maine shoved to the back of Annabel’s escritoire, written in the early years of the Civil War and returned to Susannah by a family member upon Eleanor’s death in 1920. But Susannah’s letters portrayed her as merely a young woman in love with a man who happened to be a Union Army scout. Eliza Pembroke, Susannah’s aunt, was the one accused of Union loyalties. Adelaide didn’t know where the letters were now. She’d given them to Caroline when her daughter was sixteen. Likely as not, Caroline had carelessly tossed them in the trash or sold them for drug money. Caroline hadn’t believed that the house still echoed with reverberations from the past. Caroline hadn’t believed in much of anything.

  Adelaide shared her great-grandmother’s stories of crippling echoes and Holly Oak’s strange fascination with its women with her good friend Pearl decades later, to her utter regret. It wasn’t long after that that Pearl, as a self-proclaimed favor to Adelaide, asked her so-called clairvoyant cousin Eldora Meeks to verify the existence of ghostly activity.

  That had been a mistake. The woman knew nothing about houses. Eldora Meeks may or may not have the ability to talk to spirits, but she surely had no gift for talking to houses. Yet Pearl passed the story of her cousin’s unsubstantiated discovery of the ghost of Susannah Page to anyone with the slightest interest, despite Adelaide’s persistent requests that she shut up about it. Susannah Page didn’t haunt the halls.

  Undeterred, Pearl had told Adelaide that sooner or later someone was going to have to make peace with Susannah’s ghost.

  And Adelaide had said that was proof enough that Eldora hadn’t the slightest idea what she was talking about.

  There was no peace to be made with Susannah. Susannah wasn’t the one at war.

  Adelaide now set the cut pieces of the frock coat on a third chair and folded the wool. She spread out the green silk lining and reached for her pin cushion. She heard the kitchen door open and close again. Marielle had come back inside.

  The doorbell rang, and Adelaide stood motionless for a moment. It was early, only a little after nine. Too early for even the Blue-Haired Old Ladies to make a social call. She listened as Marielle opened the door, heard a man’s voice say he had a package for a Mr. Carson Bishop, heard Marielle say that she could sign for it; she was his wife.

  Adelaide went back to pinning the weightless length of silk, glad that Pearl or Maxine or Deloris hadn’t decided to stop in. The Blue-Haired Old Ladies were making stops at Holly Oak even after the other neighborly welcomes had ceased. Pearl had been by just the day before to visit for a spell in the kitchen and invite Marielle to lunch the following week.

  And just as Adelaide had predicted, Pearl’s reaction to finding out Carson and Marielle were sleeping in Susannah Page’s bedroom had been swift and animated.

  “Oh dearie, are you sure that’s wise?” Pearl had said to Marielle. “I mean, of all the bedrooms, that one?”

  To which Marielle had replied, “But nothing happened in that room. Right?”

  Adelaide had patted Marielle’s hand. “Nothing happened in that room.”

  Pearl had leaned forward in her chair, vigorous concern multiplying the wrinkles around her eyes. “She slept in there, Marielle.”

  “What difference does that make?” Adelaide had said.

  “Well, where do you think her ghost would feel most comfortable? Where do you think her ghost would want to be?” Pearl replied. “Wouldn’t she want to be in her own bedroom?”

  Adelaide reached for her teacup. “To do what? Sleep? I wasn’t aware that ghosts needed sleep.”

  Pearl loudly clucked her tongue. “That is my point exactly! Carson and Marielle are sleeping in a room occupied by a ghost who doesn’t sleep!” Pearl turned to Marielle. “You really should consider moving into a different bedroom.”

  “That’s enough, Pearl.” Adelaide had taken a sip of her tea and replaced the cup. Pearl clamped her mouth shut. And Marielle offered to refresh all their teacups.

  After Pearl left, Marielle hadn’t asked Adelaide for any more information about Susannah or the room she was sleeping in except to say that Pearl was nothing if not insistent. And Adelaide had reassured her that Pearl’s imagination had always been hanging on one hinge and to pay her no mind. But Marielle’s mood seemed thoughtful the rest of the day, brooding almost. Pearl’s persistence that Susannah was an unhappy ghost traipsing about Holly Oak had obviously unnerved her. Adelaide had wondered if Marielle told Carson about Pearl’s visit and warnings. But since Carson hadn’t said anything, not even a gentle request that Adelaide tell Pearl to mind her own business, she assumed she had not.

  Adelaide felt a kink in her back from bending over the table, and she stood and stretched carefully. Another cup of tea would be nice. She opened the door of the parlor and took a step toward the kitchen but stopped when she saw Marielle standing statue-still, looking at the family photographs that lined the lower half of the staircase. She stood on the third step, her arms crossed loosely in front of her, unaware that Adelaide had opened the parlor door and now watched her. Adelaide took a step back, wanting to silently close the door and pretend she never had the thought to get another cup of tea. But she couldn’t take her eyes off Marielle as the young woman’s gaze traveled the wall, resting first on the sepia-toned portrait of Susannah Page seated with her young daughter, Annabel, standing next to her, then Annabel’s wedding portrait, and then Adelaide in her mother’s arms with her christening dress flowing over her mother’s skirt, then her father wearing his army uniform. Then Adelaide’s engagement photo, Caroline as a child on a tricycle, Caroline’s senior portrait, Sara in a prom dress, and then Sara in front of her studio with baby Brette in her arms and Hudson embracing her from behind.

  Marielle studied the wall from the bend in the stairs at the landing where the first portrait hung to the bottom stair where the gallery ended with Sara and the children. Then she lifted her head to start at the top again, her neck slowly guiding her gaze down the wall of photographs.

  Adelaide pushed the door closed without a sound, the hankering for another cup of tea dismissed.

  arielle sat on the floor of Brette’s room, an eruption of Barbie dresses blooming in her lap. Brette sat next to her, tugging at a tiny pink warmup suit on a flaxen-haired doll. The roar of the air conditioner pushing cooled air into the room muted the other sounds in the house; Marielle would not hear Carson come home from work unless she opened the bedroom door or the A/C switched off, which was highly improbable.

  She had been warned about Virginia heat in June. Two college friends back in Phoenix—East Coast transplants, both of them—had warned her at her bridal shower with knowing looks and clublike solidarity that she hadn’t felt heat until she lived through a humid Southeast summer.

  Marielle had reminded them that it’s usually 115 degrees in Phoenix on any day in the summer, and the two friends had just laughed.

  “You don’t know what you’re in for, hon,” one of them had said. And the other had nodded empathetically.

  Marielle now gently moved the dresses off her lap and stood.

  “Where are you going?” Brette said, her face at once morphing into worry.

  “Just opening the door so we can hear when Daddy comes home.”

  “I don’t want Hudson coming in.”

/>   Marielle walked over to the door and opened it. “I don’t think he will.” She could hear the sounds of the TV two floors down in the family room. SpongeBob turned up too loud.

  She came back to the rug and retook her spot, pulling her cell phone out of her pocket as she sat down and setting it where she could see its windowed face. If Carson called to say he would be late, which she was learning happened a lot, she didn’t want to fumble in her pocket for the phone and miss talking to him.

  She missed their phone conversations. For the first three months of their relationship, the phone had been their sole tether to each other. They spent an hour or more every night talking across a span of miles that didn’t separate them anymore. He hardly ever called her now. Of course, he wouldn’t. Why would he? They weren’t dating. They were married. They lived in the same house. They talked face to face every day, but somehow it was different.

  It had been three weeks since she and Carson and the children had returned from the family honeymoon at Disney World, and it needled her that she was instantly aware of how long it had been. Marielle had expected some transitional stress with the move, the marriage, and instant motherhood. She wasn’t naive. Her mother had warned her she would probably have it; so had her matron of honor, Jill, and just about everybody back in Arizona—as if she didn’t know there might be some tough days, especially since she was moving into a house which didn’t require a towel, a fork, or even so much as a light bulb from her apartment in Phoenix.

  Chad had been right about toasters and Crock-Pots. Holly Oak already had those. Holly Oak already had everything.

  All it really needed was a wife and mother—roles it was used to having but which she barely understood. She got that. There would be some transitional stress.

  But no one could have prepared her for the oddities of living in a house with so profound a past. Photographs of Holly Oak’s former and current residents lined the halls. Downstairs, sepia-toned portraits of Mona Lisa–faced women in full skirts, uniformed men with handlebar mustaches, a child in a christening gown, black-and-white wedding photos, and high school senior pictures and babies and prom photos—they covered the walls like curious spectators. Carson had taken down a few of Sara’s photos, but he asked to leave up a couple for the sake of the children. How could she say no to that? She didn’t. He removed his old engagement and wedding photos, but he’d left the eight by ten of Sara sitting on the step in front of her studio with Brette in her arms, fat-cheeked and diapered, and Hudson hanging over her back, his arms necklaced around her. It hung next to the third stair, between baby pictures of Hudson and Brette. And Marielle walked past it all the time.

  No one had any prenuptial advice about how to walk past a photo gallery like that every day.

  And no one had advice on how to put away dishes that Adelaide had been using in the kitchen for decades or how to buy a different kind of detergent than what was on the laundry room shelf or how to handle the rumor that the house was haunted by a ghost, that dead Yankees had been buried in its cellar, and that there may or may not be a curse, depending on who you talked to.

  Driving the children to and from school, attending their end-of-year art shows and soccer games, and familiarizing herself with what they liked and didn’t like had filled her days when they first returned from Florida. And so had the neighborly visits. But now school was out. It was the middle of June and the visits had stopped. The summer months stretched ahead of her like a thorny chore she was unprepared to touch. And the oppressive heat outside seemed to confirm that she was no match for the weeks that lay ahead.

  She had been stupid to think she wouldn’t need a job right away; some outside task to give her life meaning beyond dishes, ghosts, and making peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for two kids she barely knew and yet felt constrained to love.

  She did love them.

  She loved them.

  But loving them didn’t mean she couldn’t love other things. Like a job. Like having a purpose outside of the house. Carson had told her he would help her find a new job if she wanted, and she’d said she was fine for now just spending time getting to know the children. Besides, there weren’t desert conservation groups in Fredericksburg needing grant writers. She was going to have to reinvent herself careerwise, and there was enough reinventing going on in her life already …

  “Marielle! I said I can’t snap this.”

  Brette was kneeling in front of her, an arm outstretched with a half-clothed doll in her hand.

  “Sorry.” Marielle took the doll and snapped the tight bodice. “There you go.”

  “She’s going on her honeymoon. Like we did.” Brette jammed the doll, alone, into a blue plastic sports car.

  “Where’s her groom?” Marielle asked.

  Brette looked about the room, littered with Barbie clothes, plastic furniture, and four or five additional blond-headed female dolls. “I don’t know where he is.” She turned back to the doll in the car. “She doesn’t need him. She can go on her honeymoon by herself.”

  Marielle watched as Brette zoomed the car around the oval rug in her room, running over little shoes and purses and plastic dishes. A few popped into the air and fell back down like jacks. As Brette pushed the car around the room, Marielle began to wonder how hard it would be to freelance out of the house. Set up a grant-writing business and work out of the room off the kitchen, perhaps? Maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to diversify after all. There had to be plenty of nonprofits on the East Coast that needed contracted grant writers; she didn’t have to solely work on environmental projects. Maybe she could do a little copyediting or proposal writing …

  “Now she’s at Disney World!” Brette lifted the doll out of the car, held her high for a moment, and then lowered her to the floor. She turned to Marielle. “Want to see my mom’s Barbie clothes? I have them. Mimi gave them to me.”

  The word mom pulled Marielle’s attention back to Brette. “Sure,” she replied, mentally massaging away the poking reminder that she wasn’t the girl’s first mother. Her only.

  Brette hopped up to her feet and opened her closet. She withdrew a vintage cosmetic case, upholstered in pink vinyl with a black handle, and sat back down with it. “They kind of smell. They’re old.”

  The girl opened the case and began to pull out tiny outfits, purses, and hats, releasing an odor of aged fabric. Marielle recognized a few pieces from her own childhood Barbie collection. The chef’s apron with its tiny black-checked potholders, the pink ballerina tutu with the white diamond-shaped sparkles, the black lamé sheath.

  “And look!” Brette said. “Her bride dress.”

  Brette pulled out a white lacy concoction that frothed tulle and acetate. She handed it to Marielle.

  “Wow. These are all lovely.”

  “They were my mom’s,” Brette said again, and Marielle nodded.

  “Did you know my mom?” the girl asked, her head cocked in doubt.

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “I don’t remember her. But we have movies. Sometimes I like to watch them.”

  Marielle smoothed out the wrinkles in the tiny wedding dress. “That sounds like a great way to remember her.”

  Brette stared at her. “Do you want to watch them sometime?”

  Marielle blinked. A dozen indescribable responses, minuscule and lacking definition, pinged in her head. “Um. Maybe. Sometime.”

  “My mommy had blond hair.”

  “Like you,” Marielle said stiffly.

  “Yours is brown.”

  “Yes.”

  “But I like it.”

  Marielle instinctively reached for her, and Brette climbed in her lap. “I’m glad.”

  Brette lay her head against Marielle’s chest, and for several seconds neither one said anything.

  For a moment, the room felt right. The moments-ago urgency to set up a business, to fit in, to not count the weeks, drifted a bit, gave up some of its weight. With the little girl in her lap, warm against her skin, Marielle sensed a
tender weakening inside. Not just inside her. But inside everything—inside the air around them, the wood floors, the plaster walls that had been painted over and over and over. As if a tumbler had moved into place, just one of many inside a very old lock.

  She leaned her chin on Brette’s head, silently reassuring herself that soon she would not be counting the weeks. Soon she would use her own dishes in the kitchen. Soon her portraits would be done and her own wedding picture would hang on the wall. And then a day would come, maybe next year, when she would forget she had been counting weeks, and perhaps they would be a family of five then, and Adelaide’s secrets about curses and record players and ghosts would not matter anymore, and she would not have to convince herself that she loved Carson enough to have married him and his past.

  She could see the tip of that future day as she sat with Brette snug in her embrace.

  Brette sighed against her. Marielle kissed the top of her head.

  “Sometimes I want to call you Mommy,” Brette said.

  Marielle nodded.