After Alice Fell(13)

“It’s hot.”

“Go ask Saoirse for a vase, Toby.” Cathy cups his cheek and gives him a peck. “And a glass of water for Auntie.”

When it is the two of us, she turns to the flowers, lifting a stalk to strip the leaves. A ladybug drops from a stem, stretches its shelled wings. Cathy holds out a finger and waits for it to crawl onto her palm. “Look.” She smiles at me, as if sharing a marvelous gift. “She’s good luck. We’ll keep her in the house.” With a flick of her wrist, she tips the ladybug to the table. It lands on its back. Its legs flail and wings flap and close until it rights itself and crawls to the safety of a broad leaf.

“You should have asked them to stay.”

“I . . .”

“Where were you going?”

“I wanted the coach.”

“There’s no coach on Sunday.” A milky liquid seeps from the stem and beads along the stalk. She swipes it with her thumb, then looks around for some rag or towel to clean her hand. There’s nothing but the black crepe.

“Why?”

“I want Alice’s trunk.”

“I’m sure they’ll send it.”

“I have questions for Dr. Mayhew. She shouldn’t have had any access to that roof.”

“You won’t find comfort.”

“I am looking for none.” I grab the table edge and push myself up. “I just want to know.”

But Cathy isn’t listening; she’s rearranging the flowers, a single frown line marring her forehead. “She was never at peace. Always . . . What good does it do to stir the dead? It changes nothing. Nothing at all.”





Chapter Five


But the dead stir me. Three nights the same dream.

I stand in the upstairs bedroom of a house we’ve taken for a hospital. The walls are plum, the green curtains rusty from the blood of the hands that tie the fabric back. Dr. Rawlings wears a rubber apron. He crooks his finger to me.

“You will close their eyes.” But there are hundreds of soldiers, too many, the line of cots a mile long.

“I can’t.”

“You must.”

I bend to the first man. Place my hand to his forehead, then swipe my palm over his lids. “Fare thee well,” I whisper.

The next to the next to the next. Blue eyes and green, empty sockets and clouded white.

“I can’t.”

Alice is here, kneeling before a limbless, lifeless body, drawing the eyes shut. The locket dangles from her neck.

“Why are you here?” I ask.

She looks up at me. A cicada pushes its way past her lips, its blunt red-brown head dipping as it crawls to her lower lip, transparent wings unfurling in a tissue-paper whisper.

I wake in a knot of sheets and nightclothes, the room close and musty. The wallpaper on the bed’s edge buckles and bubbles. I press a finger to smooth it, but it won’t stay put.

There’s a tap at the door. I hear Toby breathing through his nose, trying to be quiet.

If this is his habit, it will need to stop. “I’m indisposed,” I say. “If you need something, go ask Saoirse.”

The knob twists left and right. Stops.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Then you must say ‘yes.’ And ‘sorry.’”

“Yes, Auntie. Sorry.” But he doesn’t leave. He still stands on the other side of the door, the toes of his shoes just visible in the gap.

“Toby?”

He slips a blue jay’s feather under the door. Blue and black, tipped with white.

Alice came home with treasures, seeds and nettles, dandelion down and thistle silk stuck to her hair, in the weave of her skirts, clinging in tufts to the fine hair on her arms, like a tumult and chaos of clouds. Dirt beneath her nails, grit in the whorls and eddies of her palms. The trees that ringed the pond bore witness to her and she to them—an etch of initials, a trinket or bobbin or discarded laces were secreted away in slits she’d carved in the tree trunks. Sometimes I’d find buttons missing from a bodice or skirt. Other times a hairpin went missing. Not stolen, though. Replaced with an acorn. A twig with a red-tipped leaf. The bud of a spring iris. A blue jay’s feather, tipped with white.

“Thank you,” I say.

“You’re welcome.”

You’re welcome, Alice said. And her voice was like bells.

Benjamin’s picture has been moved. I’ve gone to the kitchen for coffee and come back to it moved. It was on the mantel; now it sits on the sill. Saoirse’s been cleaning and not putting things back in place. My journal shifted from the bedside drawer to the desk. The wardrobe door ajar.

I close the door, replace the portrait, and move the silk bookmark to the next blank page of the journal.

“Saoirse.”

I hear her milling in the front parlor, her hoarse hum in constant refrain.

“Saoirse.”

The humming stops. She comes to the hall and peers across to the dining room, then down the hall to me. She chews her lower lip. “Did you call me?”

“I did. I—”

She pulls at a dust rag and then swipes it across the top of the curio cabinet.

She has grown old. Too old to keep doing this. Too old to scold her for something as ridiculous as a misplaced portrait. At least I have it.