The Spite House(16)
“She lived and worked in San Antonio, but she would stay with us most summers and on the big holidays too, and we kept a bedroom reserved for her here. During the summers we used to walk up Luger Hill before it was officially a park. We made some of its trails. We had a favorite path up to the top and we hiked it two or three times a week. She’d let me get closer to the edges and drops than my daddy or mother ever would. Everyone else in the family was so protective and gloomy so much of the time. Acted like I’d break in the breeze if it blew enough to fly a kite. God forbid I should ever fall when I was out playing. When I came home with scrapes it led to a talk from my parents about how I had to be more careful. But Val would tell them the same thing she told me when I picked up a cut or a bruise during our hikes. ‘No one ever got tough without getting hurt first.’ Then she’d have to argue with my parents about the benefits of young girls growing up to be tough. She never had to convince me, though.
“Aunt Val and I were on Luger Hill on the last Saturday of May in 1948. It was a little warmer than usual for that time of year, but not too bad. Birds were singing, and you didn’t have to stop and smell the flowers to smell them. It was wonderful. Just a wonderful day. We were at one of our favorite spots, a lookout point above a rocky hollow. When it rained, a little thin waterfall would flow down the side and into a tiny baby of a creek below. Lot of green among the rocks, but not so much that it crowded the view the way it did with some of the other spots on the hill. There were other drop-offs on the hill that looked so flat and smooth you would think you could slide all the way down and not hit anything. Those made me more nervous than the others because a part of me always felt a little tempted to slide down, even though I knew it was dangerous, and I was more worried about me just suddenly doing it one day than anything else, so I’d stay away from those edges. But with this one, it was so rocky and harsh that I didn’t mind getting up close, because I knew how careful I had to be around it. That probably sounds backwards. Probably is backwards, but that’s how I felt.
“It had rained pretty heavily off and on for about a week before we’d gone up, so even though it had been sunny for the past couple of days, the little waterfall was there, and it was nice and peaceful to sit there and listen to it. My last pleasant memory of my favorite aunt, loud and talkative as she could be, didn’t involve her saying a word. I stood there listening to the waterfall and the birds and the breeze, and I watched her crouch near that edge to pick up pebbles and bounce them down the side, and I was happy.
“And then two things happened. Val stood and put her hand up against her chest. I looked at her face and saw her eyes and jaw were tight from pain. She reached out for me, grabbed my shoulder to steady herself, and I stood there confused. She was a big woman, like I said. Almost overgrown in a way. To me she looked as hale and healthy as anybody could be. And she was only fifty-five, which was old to me—older than my parents—but not that old. Not dying old. But, as I’m sure you’ve figured out, she was having a heart attack. Right there at one of our favorite places to be.”
Eunice sighed and stopped simply to take a break. She checked her watch again. Her pulse had slowed, albeit not quite down to her healthy, resting rate. So there was a tangible benefit to recounting this awful memory. That was good. She hadn’t spoken of this aloud in a long time, not since she’d hired Lafonda. It was always there, but now it was in the air, and each time she’d told it before—to Lafonda, to Dana, and to Emily—it seemed to invite things that might be present in the mansion’s many rooms to become more active.
Lost for a moment in these thoughts, she almost forgot that the foursome before her were in the room until Meredith said, “What happened then?”
Eunice said, “Well, the second thing to happen, immediately following her heart attack, was that the temperature dropped. This was not a cold spot. It was not a chill. This was like the sun had retreated.
“Let me tell you what I learned that day about the cold. For one, there’s more coldness in nature than there is anything else. When I say ‘nature’ you probably think of the woods, the fields, maybe mountains and deserts. You’re forgetting, first off, about the parts of the sea that have never seen daylight. Then there’s all the air around the tops of mountains, and then above them, up into and past the clouds. Miles of it, and it’s all too cold to be lived in. And that’s before you get out into space. It’s cold out there in ways that we can put a number on but can’t really fathom. Negative four hundred fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit, approximately. That’s the temperature in space when you’re clear from any stars. What does that number even mean? That’s not something any living thing is designed to feel. But what about the ones done with living? They don’t have any use for heat anymore. How deep is the cold they carry with them? I’ll tell you. Imagine your bones turning to ice so fast you don’t have time to scream. Imagine a cold so deep it makes the day grayer without a cloud in the sky. Hard to imagine, isn’t it?”
Meredith and the big man nodded. The techie seemed transfixed. The bald man looked more confused, like he was still working out how to make up for his earlier mistake.
“That’s the cold that blew through while my aunt Val had her heart attack,” Eunice said. “Not a ‘chill.’ Not a spot. Nothing as safe or stationary as that. This felt like the end of the world, except personal. It didn’t belong to anyone else. It was there for us. It came to us.