Follow Me to Ground(34)

What is Olivia out to do, tucked safely inside her grave?

–I’ve come a long way to see you.

–Come in, I say, and he opens the door himself, makes the hallway feel small. We walk through to the kitchen; I sit at the table and he shakes his head when I suggest that he do the same. He leans instead on the back of a chair, both hands gripping it, the knuckles blanching.

–I didn’t hear your car.

–I parked a little ways away. Legs needed stretching.

I put a hand on my collar and rub at the divot there.

–Your mother was still young.

He makes an easy gesture, letting me know he’s had his fill of grief. His hands have her quickness.

–What age was she? Fifty-two?

Slow, careful look he gives me.

–That’s right, fifty-two.

I should have said fifty. Fifty-five.

He looks around the cupboards. All of them long empty.

–I wasn’t sure you’d be here.

He’s giving off something like Samson’s scent.

–I saw you, in your mother, before you were born.

Like my tongue is unravelling down my chest. Years of quiet taking their toll. But he only says

–She told me a little about it. Said you and your father used to heal people who lived in the town.

–Yes, we saw to them … fixed them when we could.

–Mother said you fixed her twice, when she was having me.

I look at the window, look back at the table.

–A few days ago she told me she was always afraid to have more, once you stopped healing.

He coughs without covering his mouth and looks down at an angle to the floor.

–Or not taking on patients, rather. And anyway. We moved away.

–Father died, and I lost my gift.

–There’s a jar belonging to this house in our kitchen. She kept it next to the tiled part of the wall.

Dark-eyed, watchful Olivia.

–I hope you don’t think me cruel, but you seem to be coping well.

He laughs at this and moves one hand, closed in a fist, behind his back. Begins kneading at some tension there.

–We weren’t particularly close. My mother was always busy.

He shifts the hair on his forehead to reveal the skin beneath. Not yet cooled, still lined with its saltwater beads.

–I don’t think the town knew what to do with a single mother.

–Can’t tell you how small our home seemed, even as a boy. But yes. She was a single mother.

And now: a child no longer. A young man looking down at me with anger lining his insides.

–You never saw my mother again?

I let out a breath and lean back in my chair.

–No. I don’t leave the house.

–Why’s that?

–I’m sick.

With loneliness. With waiting.

–I’m very sick.

–You wear it well.

He means to be cruel or to bring to the air some trace of sex.

He’s too like him. They’re too alike. Though Samson would have no taste for this nonsense back and forth. He’s gotten that from her.

–Am I very different than you expected?

He straightens then and gathers the front of his vest in his fist, smiling and rubbing it over his stomach, stretching it toward his sternum.

–I’m sorry Miss Ada, but I’ve been hearing about you since I was a child – and mixed things at that. I hardly know what to think.

–Cures like to talk.

–What’s that now?

–People … often speak nonsense. It strikes them as odd that I live here alone.

–My mother said to be wary of you.

I pick up the lap of my dress and rub my face in it, forgetting myself. When I look at him again his stubble is glinting like a brand-new coin.

–What’s that?

–My mother. She said you were a little bit a witch.

My turn to laugh. I look into the garden. It must be almost time. All these years alone, and now I’m rich with company.

To get up to the attic you need to crawl on all fours. Your face comes very close to the splinters in the boards. The sound you make is like an animal with calloused feet. It’s not a place where you can softly tread. No matter how small the movement or sound it comes shaking down through the whole house. So loud you expect the walls to shudder and the ceiling to shake.

Those first months alone I went into the attic often. In the summer evenings its window lets in a wedge of light that follows the sharp angle of the roof.

I’d stand and sniff at the air, getting beyond the smell of the heap of blankets I’d nested in as a child. I felt their scratching wool catch the thin hair of my thin feet.

This was where he’d taken me when I was learning to taste, to touch and hear and see, while my skin came away in layers to leave a more weathered coating behind. The floorboards coated in a dense sweep of loam, Father making noises to teach me the rhythms of speech.

What did I look like before I looked like myself?

A huddled creature in the ground. Carried up here and permitted to grow, sleeping through the too-harsh day with Father coming up every evening. I remember his hands on me; the base of his palm a blunt instrument of measure between my legs and on the small of my back, his thumb’s incremental progression along the length of my spine a means of testing each inch for cracks.