The Invited(67)

She reached for Nate beside her, but he was not there.

She rolled over, realized she was not in her bed but on the plywood subfloor of the unfinished house.

Her head ached and felt foggy.

It was the smoke. The smoke from the mill.

But that was only a dream.

There was a little pile of half a dozen bricks from the mill beside her, one side of each stained black. There was a flashlight beside them, turned off.

    She’d snuck back up to the house after Nate had gone to bed and brought the bricks into the house, hoping that they might trigger something, that they might pull someone back. But after sitting in the dark with the bricks for a while, she had realized her mistake. Hattie had come back not just because of the beam but because she had a connection to this place. What reason would one of the mill workers have to show herself to Helen? To come back to a little half-built house at the edge of a bog in Hartsboro, forty miles from where the mill once stood. She’d been debating going back down to the trailer but decided that she’d stay a little while in case Hattie decided to show up again. Maybe Hattie would give her a sign about what she was supposed to do next. She must’ve dozed off on the floor, waiting in vain.

She sat up, pushed the button on her watch: 3:33 a.m.

She was in the opening between the kitchen and the living room, under the hanging tree beam, facing into the kitchen. She studied the corner where she’d seen Hattie three weeks ago. She looked up at the beam, at the dark shape in the dim moonlight that filtered through the windows.

There were voices behind her. Whispering. Talking so low, it sounded more like radio static than human voices, but she knew that was what they were. She could recognize the ebb and flow of conversation, of two people trying not to be heard.

Was Nate here?

She had an absurd thought then: that she would turn and he’d be there, talking with his white doe; that the deer was actually Hattie, just like Riley said. They’d be sitting together, and the deer would be whispering to him, speaking perfect English, singing him a little song maybe…Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy. Or maybe something else. Something strangely romantic—Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me—as she looked up at him with her big, glossy doe eyes.

She heard a giggle, but it was all wrong—low and crackly, like it was coming through a far-off AM radio station. She didn’t want to see, didn’t want to know what was there.

Slowly, she forced herself to turn her head and look, to see who, or what, was behind her.

There, sitting in the living room in the place the new brick hearth would go, was Hattie. She was on a stool. Where does a ghost get a stool? Helen wondered. Hattie was wearing the same white dress she’d had on the last time Helen had seen her, but there was no rope around her neck. She was smiling, laughing. And at her feet, a young woman sat, having her hair braided by Hattie. The woman shared Hattie’s dark hair and eyes. Helen saw the young woman wore a plain blue dress, but it was tattered and burned, stained brown and yellow from smoke. And she carried the smell of smoke on her; Helen caught a whiff of it in the air.

    This must be Hattie’s daughter, Jane. The one no one knew what had happened to.

But Helen knew.

The pieces clicked into place. She didn’t know the details yet, but she was sure of one thing: Hattie’s daughter, Jane, had died in the fire at the mill.

“Jane?” Helen said, and the woman looked up at her, opened her mouth to speak, to tell Helen something, something important, Helen knew, but no sound came out.

The room flickered with light; the beam of a flashlight dancing through the window.

“Helen?” Nate called, coming through the door, shining his light on her. “Helen, my god! What are you doing out here?”

“I…” She glanced to the center of the living room. Hattie and Jane were gone.

I don’t know what I’m doing here. Maybe I’m going crazy.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “So I came up here. Thinking about the kitchen. What kind of countertops do you think would work with a slate floor?”

“Well, come back to bed, okay? It’s, like, three in the morning. I was worried sick when I woke up and couldn’t find you.”

“Sure,” Helen said, “of course. I’m sorry, I’m just…excited, I guess.” She smiled what she hoped was a reassuring everything’s fine smile.

As they walked out the front door, she looked back over her shoulder and thought she just caught the outline of a simple stool sitting in the darkness. She closed the door.





CHAPTER 20



Jane





SEPTEMBER 3, 1943

When Jane woke up, she didn’t know it was to be her last day on earth. She roused her children and husband, made coffee and oatmeal just like every other morning. Her husband, Silas, read the paper.

“More news about the war, Daddy?” her son asked.

“We sunk a Japanese submarine,” her husband said.

“Boom!” shouted the boy.

“No shouting or explosives allowed at the table, please,” Jane pleaded.

Her daughter scowled into her oatmeal, whispered to her doll.

Jane looked at the photographs of the people in the newspaper and thought she herself was not unlike them: a paper woman, one-dimensional. That’s what her family saw. But really, she was more like the chains of paper dolls her daughter would cut from leftover newspaper: folded together, she looked like one, but once you opened her up, you saw she contained multitudes.