What the Dead Want(35)

“We can’t leave it here!” Gretchen said.

“C’mon!” Hope was shouting from beneath the window. “What are you waiting for?”

“We’ll come back for it,” Hawk said.

“No,” Gretchen said. “I saw my mother. My mother, she’s trapped in there. I can’t leave her.”

For a moment she thought of how she was sure she’d seen her mother when she was a child. How she’d followed that woman, taken her picture.

Of all the frightening things that had happened in the last two days, what terrified Gretchen the most was the idea that she was imagining all of it—that there were no little girls, no swarm of wasps, no ghosts, just an abandoned house. The way she seemed to be about to faint and then slipping into some kind of behavior and thinking like Esther’s was unlike anything she’d ever felt before. Even Hawk seemed too beautiful, too sweet and familiar, to be real. From her aunt’s first phone call, the whole thing seemed impossible. Maybe she’d been hit by a car crossing Delancey Street and was in a coma and this was all just a dream.

Hope was still calling to them from the front of the house, the cat was still yowling behind the door.

Like a breeze passing though the room, a feeling of annoyed confidence swept over her again. She wasn’t a child anymore and Esther didn’t bring her here for no reason.

“I’m sure,” she said. “I’m sure I saw my mother.”



1860

Lincoln has won the election. Not a single Southern state voted for him. And now there is even more talk of war.

Our work is just as dangerous. And fights with my parents seem to have no reprieve. My mother asked if it is my intention to become a spinster. The only good thing about it is she encourages me to spend time with George. Bakes pies for him and asks me to take them over. On the way I stop by the church and talk and plan with James. He is torn by the need to preach and the desire to go and fight. When he talks like this it knocks the wind out of me. I don’t know if I’m afraid to lose him, or if I am jealous that I have no options myself, no option to stay and make a real life, no option to leave and fight, no money for school, total and complete dependence. My every last decision determined by men and the laws they’ve made against my freedom.

Yesterday evening when I returned from seeing him and our talk about his decisions, it all came to a head. My mother asked me why it took me so long to return.

I wanted to give her a simple answer and then go to bed but I found myself shouting, How dare you ask me? I am not your chattel. I am not your property!

She said that as long as I live under their roof they have a right to know and that she is terrified that I am still involving myself with aiding fugitives. That I could get us all killed. I could not contain my rage any longer.

You mean fugitives like my grandmother? I shouted. Like your mother? Like Valerie’s family? How dare you question my actions while you are living like cowards.

She said, You don’t know how it was, Fidelia. You never saw the things we’ve seen.

Oh, but I have, I said. I have seen girls my age, hobbled and scarred and covered with burns, traveling here pregnant with their white rapists’ babies.

She looked shocked but I went on.

Don’t pretend, Mother, don’t pretend that’s not why we look the way we do too.

She began crying. Then my father came in holding the tin where I hide my money and I felt like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

You will not use your money to help fugitives, he said. And he took all seventy dollars, years’ worth of my working and saving, and put it in his pocket.

Both of you, I said, are as good as murderers. Your silence and your cowardice cost LIVES. You’re no better than those killers with their torches.

At this my mother struck me.

I’m trying to keep you alive, she said.

You can’t! I shouted. You can’t!





EIGHTEEN


HAWK OPENED THE DOOR, THEN TOOK A QUICK STEP directly onto the cat, who was wearing the blue gingham doll dress. It screeched and ran off, disappearing into a room at the end of the long hallway. Celia and Rebecca were now nowhere to be seen and there was no swarm of wasps, nor a broken vase. He and Gretchen looked at one another, dumbfounded.

“Not good,” Hawk said.

“Better than a house full of ghosts and stinging insects,” she said, confused that her first instinct was not to grab the mirror and go but instead an overwhelming desire to run up to the studio and preserve Esther’s photographs. She was also dying for a cigarette again, though she’d never smoked one in her life.

She tamped down her desire to head to the attic and knelt in front of the mirror, trying to look past her own reflection. Searching somewhere in the deep well of murky glass for her mother’s form. It was an illusion, she thought, or maybe proof that her mother was dead. She wanted more than ever to get the mirror out of the house—so she could get to the bottom of these horrible mysteries.

“What could have scared off a house full of ghosts and stinging insects?” Hawk asked.

“Us?” Gretchen said, only half listening to him.

“Not a chance.”

The house was desolate, and a breeze moved the curtains just slightly. They could hear the car idling in the driveway, waiting for them.

The mirror was big—but not so big that two people couldn’t carry it down the stairs. It would have to stick partway out of the trunk, but they could get it out of there.