The Nix(34)

Then they wanted other people to see them.

They wanted their friends to stare with envy at this brand-new horse. Their horse.

It always went like this. The kids who were victims of the Nix always felt, at first, fear. Then luck. Then possession. Then pride. Then terror. They’d kick at the horse to go faster until it was in a full gallop, the kids hanging on to its neck. It was the best thing that had ever happened to them. They’d never felt so important, so full of pleasure. And only at this point—at the pinnacle of speed and joy, when they felt most in control of the horse, when they felt the most ownership of it, when they most wanted to be celebrated for it and thus felt the most vanity and arrogance and pride—would the horse veer off the road that led to town and gallop toward the cliffs overlooking the sea. It ran full bore toward that great drop into the violent churning water below. And the kids screamed and yanked back on the horse’s mane and cried and wailed but nothing mattered. The horse leaped off the cliff and dropped. The children clung to its neck even as they fell, and if they weren’t bashed to death on the rocks, they drowned in the frigid water.

This was a story Faye had heard from her father. All her ghost stories came from Grandpa Frank, who was a tall and thin and intensely withdrawn man with a perplexing accent. Most people found him intimidating in his silence, but Samuel always thought it was a relief. Whenever they visited him in Iowa on those rare Thanksgivings or Christmases, the family would sit around the table eating and not saying a word. It was hard to have a conversation when it was met only with a nod of his head, a dismissive “Hm.” Mostly they ate their turkey until Grandpa Frank was finished eating and left to watch television in the other room.

The only time Grandpa Frank was ever really animated was when he told them stories of the old country—old myths, old legends, old tales about ghosts he’d heard growing up where he’d grown up, in far-north Norway, in a little fishing village in the arctic that he left when he was eighteen. When he told Faye about the Nix, he said the moral was: Don’t trust things that are too good to be true. But then she grew up and came to a new conclusion, which she told Samuel in the month before leaving the family. She told him the same story but added her own moral: “The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst.”

Samuel didn’t understand.

“The Nix doesn’t appear as a horse anymore,” she said. They were in the kitchen hoping for a break in the heat wave that now seemed endless, sitting there reading with the refrigerator door wide open and a fan blowing the cold air onto them, drinking ice water, glasses sweating wet circles on the table. “The Nix used to appear as a horse,” she said, “but that was in the old days.”

“What does it look like now?”

“It’s different for everyone. But it usually appears as a person. Usually it’s someone you think you love.”

Samuel still did not understand.

“People love each other for many reasons, not all of them good,” she said. “They love each other because it’s easy. Or because they’re used to it. Or because they’ve given up. Or because they’re scared. People can be a Nix for each other.”

She sipped her water, then pressed the cold glass to her forehead. She closed her eyes. It was a long, tedious Saturday afternoon. Henry had gone into the office after another one of their fights, this one on the issue of dirty dishes. Their late-seventies-era avocado-colored dishwasher had finally stopped working this week, and not once had Henry volunteered to clean the growing pile of plates and bowls and cookware and glasses that had overrun the sink and much of the counter. Samuel suspected his mother was intentionally letting the pile get out of hand—maybe even contributing to it more than usual, using several pots for a meal that probably required only one—as a kind of test. Would Henry notice? Would he help? That he did neither of these things was something she extrapolated great meaning from.

“It’s like home ec class all over again,” she told him when the pile finally became unbearable.

“What are you talking about?” Henry said.

“Just like in high school. You go have fun while I cook and clean. Nothing’s changed. In twenty years, absolutely nothing has changed.”

Henry washed all the dishes, then claimed urgent weekend duties at the office, leaving Faye and Samuel alone, together, again. They sat in the kitchen and read from their respective books. Incomprehensible poetry for her. Choose Your Own Adventure for him.

“I knew a girl named Margaret in high school,” Faye said. “Margaret was a very bright and witty girl. And in school she fell in love with a boy named Jules. A handsome boy who could do anything. Everyone was jealous of her. But it turns out Jules was her Nix.”

“Why? What happened?”

She set her glass in the puddle it had made on the wood. “He disappeared,” she said. “She got stranded, never left town. I hear she’s still there, working as a cashier at her dad’s pharmacy.”

“Why did he do that?”

“That’s what a Nix does.”

“She couldn’t tell?”

“It’s difficult to see. But a good rule to remember is that anyone you fall in love with before you’re an adult is probably a Nix.”

“Anyone?”

“Probably anyone.”

“When did you meet Dad?”