What the Dead Want(34)

She and my father say that things are better now, and that I am being rash and reckless even in talking too much about race. But if things were better why would they be afraid of anyone finding out? Why would they tell me to stay where I am? Why would they insist we keep quiet and keep our heads down? It’s simply fear.

Our very blood carries the whole story. The hunter and the hunted. The slaver and the enslaved. The awful split at the bottom of the soul that states irrefutably: this is what it means to be an American.





SEVENTEEN


HOPE HAD THAT SAME GRIM AND DETERMINED LOOK ON her face Gretchen had seen in the car. She tried to calculate a way out the window, but the drop was steep and the rosebush so thick with thorns it seemed impossible. The car was sitting there beneath them, trunk open waiting for whatever part of the archive they could manage, and the sound of the swarm still filled the hallway outside, but only a few wasps remained in the room—batting themselves against the windows and walls before flying out into the open air.

Gretchen couldn’t shake the memory of them crawling all over her, trying to get into her mouth. The sharp pain of the stings was subsiding and a tight numbness was taking its place.

Hawk was stacking piles of papers and boxes in the middle of the room, stoically ignoring the raised bumps on his arms.

“I think we can get out this window,” Hope said.

“Yeah, it’ll be a real pleasure climbing down the thorn hedge carrying dusty boxes full of fragile papers,” Gretchen said, and was shocked at how sarcastic and harsh her own words sounded. Hope and Hawk looked up at her. Seconds before, her heart had been beating in her throat and she had been filled with so many different emotions—now she just felt annoyed and impatient, overcome with the feeling of being in someone else’s skin, the way she’d felt at the church; she scratched at her swollen eyebrow in annoyance and then looked away.

She wanted to apologize, but when the siblings gave each other an uneasy look it only made her laugh.

“You know,” Hope said, “you sound like Esther.”

Gretchen shrugged. She didn’t just sound like Esther, she felt like Esther. She began to feel light-headed and a little nauseated as though her own thoughts were being pushed to the back of her mind and something else was taking over. Could it be the stings? She wanted a gin fizz and a cigarette and to get all this solved immediately. She paced back and forth; she went to the closet and looked for anything that could be used to climb out of the windows, but there was no rope. Maybe the swarm would make its way outside or downstairs. It would have to—it wouldn’t stay right there outside the door, would it?

She knelt down and stared through the keyhole. The black cloud of insects was swarming near the ceiling while the little girls played happily beneath it, looking in the mirror. Their dark sunken eyes were reflected in the mottled glass. For a moment they looked translucent, but not the way a double exposure does—translucent like she could see the solid fact of their skeletons, gray beneath their pale dirty skin. She shuddered but couldn’t look away. Wasps flew in random arcs in front of the mirror, plunking into the glass and bouncing off, and then in the space above the girls’ heads she saw her own haggard face reflected in it again. This was impossible, she was behind a solid door, not standing behind Celia and Rebecca, but there it was, her face, tired and drawn.

Hawk came over and put his hand on her shoulder.

“How’s it look out there?” She didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t seen her mother’s face in six years, but it was undeniable. The figure looking out from behind the cold mottled glass was not hers at all. It was Mona.

Her chest felt tight and she couldn’t speak. She squinted, then looked again.

“I don’t know if this is an illusion,” she whispered to herself.

The girls still played merrily in front of the mirror, their fading and frail bodies possessed of a power that sent a sick chill through her bones. The swarm had dwindled. She watched as Celia and Rebecca captured the old gray cat and tried to put their doll’s clothes on it. The animal was yowling and trembling in fear, its ears back, and they were laughing and singing to it, petting it roughly with their dirty, sooty hands.

“Gretchen,” Hawk said again, putting a hand on her shoulder. “What is it?” She turned away from the keyhole and looked up at him.

“That mirror,” she said.

“You guys,” Hope interrupted, “I’ve got it figured out!” She was quickly rolling up the old Persian rug that had lain at the foot of the bed and was carrying it over to the window, then flopped it out so that it covered a length of the wild thorny roses. It stuck firmly in place—but the thorns did not go all the way through. The weight of the rug toppled part of the rose hedge so that it was nearly pressed to the ground.

Hope put a box of books onto the carpet and it slid down, landing in the lawn just a few yards from the car. Then she did it with another and another.

“C’mon,” she said to Gretchen and Hawk. “We’re next.”

Then she stepped out onto the ledge and stood on the carpeted rosebush, which wavered under her weight. She balanced as though she was on the back of some great animal.

“We’ve got to bring the mirror,” Gretchen said.

Hawk stared at her. Hope was already on her way down, scooting along the carpet, which moved precariously but still supported her.