Resurrection House (7 page)

Mr. Barnes beckoned his daughter closer and took up her hand. “Maybe I was wrong about all the things I kept from you, but I had to shield you. What’s happening to me now is part of all that, Chloe, and if you want to understand it one day, then you will. And when you do, you can decide whether I failed or succeeded in protecting you. You’ve been everything I’d ever hoped you could be, kiddo, and when I’m gone, you’ll really be free. So trust me now. Okay? Go downstairs and let Jennifer help me with what I have to do.”

Chloe yanked her hand from her father’s fingers and bolted out of the room.

“You’re lying,” Jennifer said to Mr. Barnes.

“What do you mean?”

“You told me earlier that Marion means to take Chloe next,” Jennifer said. “This may not end with your death. Chloe will suffer exactly the way you have.”

“You can stop her,” said Mr. Barnes.

“If it’s Marion’s spirit that’s after you, I might be able to interfere long enough for your soul to pass out of her reach but that’s all. She could still come back for Chloe. Saving you solves nothing. The only thing that might is if you let her take you and hope she’s satisfied at that and leaves Chloe alone.”

“Do you think that’s likely?”

“No way for me to guess,” Jennifer said. “But I don’t see any other way to help your daughter.”

“I’ve spent my whole life helping her,” said the dying man. “And what a fucking mess I’ve made of it. Now it’s my time, and all I want is some peace. If you stop Marion from taking me, I’ll wind up where I belong, good or bad. So, I’m leaving this up to you. You’re Chloe’s friend. Save me or don’t, let me have my fair shot or not, whichever you think will be best for my daughter.”

Jennifer knew a single binding incantation, gleaned from her research. She could try it and hope it would be sufficient to hold Marion Barnes, but she feared it would not be enough. She wasn’t sure she should use it to help the dying man at the expense of her old friend.

She lifted the hem of her shirt, knotted it above her bellybutton, and then stood in the mirror, hoping for some sign among her tattoos. Nothing came at first. Sweat trickled through her hair and dripped down her back. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, closed her eyes, and felt the room swimming around her. It was baking and hazy. She opened her eyes and felt the pull of her tattoos, drawing her line of sight along her abdomen, over her ribs, across her chest to her neck and the bulge of her clavicle. The black ink flowed like melting ice, drifted, and roiled, and then as swiftly as it had happened, it ended.

Jennifer turned back to Mr. Barnes. “I must have something that belonged to your wife to make this work. Chloe told me you got rid of all her clothes.”

“Not all.” Mr. Barnes pointed toward the closet. “Top shelf. Shoebox.”

Behind old pillows and stacks of books and papers, Jennifer found a tattered cardboard container. A pink, silk scarf lay coiled inside like a petrified newborn. Jennifer removed it and let it unwind.

“She was wearing that when she died,” said Mr. Barnes.

He gasped abruptly for air, and then seemed to diminish as if he had just expended his last reserve of energy. His eyes shimmered with dying light, and his face turned ashen.

A blur of motion crossed the corner of the mirror and set Jennifer’s skin crawling with goose bumps.

Gulls flapped at the windows.

In seconds the tapping began.

Mr. Barnes shrank into his voluminous bedding. His machines launched into a series of pleading alarms. His body trembled, and he coughed up something gray and sticky from between his cracked, blood-crusted lips, and then his head fell back, and his last breath passed out of him. The heart monitor recorded a fading beat, and Jennifer guessed Chloe’s father would be dead in seconds.

Glass cracked. The noise cut through the air like a snapping whip. Another broken pane followed.

A horrible noise gurgled from Mr. Barnes’ throat, and his cardiac monitor howled a single, prolonged note.

The windows erupted inward, spewing thin slivers of glass pecked loose by the frenzied gulls. The birds hammered their beaks relentlessly against the ragged openings. Their wings beat like drums. More glass cascaded into the bedroom. The gulls ripped at the shades, creating a snowfall of vinyl shreds, and then they poked through the ragged openings. Blood streaked their gray and white skulls, and some of them had lost all or part of their eyes to the needle-sharp points of the broken window panes. Through the jumble of maddened bodies, Jennifer glimpsed the sky where hundreds of the shorebirds spun and twirled with cyclonic fury, a frenetic mass pressing down on the meek defenses of the house.

A window gave way and gulls spewed into the room, filling the space with their darting bodies and the scent of stale seawater. Jennifer fell to her knees and covered her eyes. The second window crashed inward and more birds flooded the room, ramming one another, and then dropping broken-necked to the bed and the carpet. Jennifer scrambled over them to reach Mr. Barnes, clambered onto the bed, and forced herself into a kneeling position at its foot.

Gulls slashed and pummeled her.

The cries drowned out the life support machines.

The bedroom door opened, and Chloe peered in.

A gull lanced her cheek, drew blood.

She screamed and dropped to her knees.

“Dad!” she screamed, and then began crawling across the floor.

Jennifer clutched Marion Barnes’ scarf tight between her hands, the silk drenched with her perspiration, and began the incantation, her voice floundering in the whirlwind of rushing, screeching gulls. But the effect was immediate. The gulls dove and swooped with fresh urgency, and several tried to pluck the scarf away from Jennifer. A shadow appeared in a corner, and then vanished, only to reappear in another place. The figure blinked around the room, taking shape in flickering clusters of gulls. Jennifer shouted louder, continuing the incantation.

The rhythm of the gulls changed.

They tightened their groups, traced a series of interwoven rings centered over Jennifer at the edge of the bed. Jennifer glanced back to see Chloe reaching up for her father, and then she felt the frigid, clammy hand on her shoulder. The dark figure stood beside her now, its face unmistakable, its features focused by rage.

Jennifer shouted until her throat ached.

Marion Barnes hissed.

Filthy rags, the remnants of her burial clothes, hung in tatters from skin that looked like orange rind left to rot in a puddle of water. The dead woman’s eyes blasted Jennifer with a palpable sensation like twin millipedes crawling over her flesh. Jennifer squelched the panic welling up inside her, struggled to keep her stammering voice even, and continued the incantation.

The dead thing churned, a construct of squirming, terrified seagulls bound by raw, malevolent will. Here and there a gull’s head broke the fetid skin with little pairs of stark eyes staring out from the ruined human shape that contained them. Marion opened her mouth and her gnarled lips flapped, but no voice emerged. The caws of the gulls filled the air.

Jennifer edged backward, scuttling over Mr. Barnes’ corpse. He was dead, and as Jennifer had imagined, the machines persisted in emulating his life functions. His chest rose and fell. Medicines drained into his veins. Meaningless air passed from his throat. Jennifer inadvertently slid a finger in his mouth, felt a whoosh of dead breath, and then snatched her hand back. She needed to hold out just a while longer. Chloe threw herself across her father and sobbed against his chest.

Jennifer lunged forward, catching the dead woman’s neck in the silk scarf she had once owned and dragging her to the floor. Gulls battered them. The birds were everywhere, filling the air, rising from Marion Barnes’ makeshift body. Jennifer knotted the scarf, tightened it, bound it. Chloe’s mother reached around with decayed fingers and scratched at Jennifer’s back. Her body lurched as she tried to buck free.

Jennifer clamped down tight, shrieking the incantation again and again. Marion snapped her head up and bit down with jagged, cockeyed teeth on Jennifer’s bottom lip. She pulled her down, close to her putrid face, and still Jennifer managed to voice the incantation. Pain lanced her mouth, and she gagged on the awful flavor of decay. Her stomach turned in a knot. She wanted to vomit, but she held back, until finally the jabbing bones forfeited their unbearable kiss. Marion Barnes’ head cracked against the floor and burst in a spray of blood and feathers.

The silk noose jerked free.

Jennifer sank several inches, landing on a bed of decimated seagulls slicked with putrescence.

The other gulls descended into rampant chaos.

All sense of a pattern to their flight dissipated as they turned wild, shocked by the confinement of the bedroom. They lashed out, and gradually managed to find their way to the windows and to the other rooms of the house. Soon they dispersed, leaving behind only a scattering of broken-winged gulls among the dead.

Jennifer experienced a moment of overwhelming grief, and wondered if she had made the right decision. She rose and walked around the room, unplugging the electrical cords of the life support machines. The appearance of life in Mr. Barnes’ corpse had deceived Marion Barnes’ into lingering too long, while her husband’s soul fled to whatever awaited it. The mechanical sounds and beeps ended. Mr. Barnes’ chest fell one last time and never rose again.

Jennifer put a hand on Chloe’s shoulder, helped her onto her feet, and led her outside to the backyard and fresh air. She peered through the trees and saw the parking lot was empty now; the only gulls in sight were far-off specks in the clear sky that might have been the last to flee the Barnes house. Chloe pressed her head against Jennifer’s shoulder and cried, and they stood there together like they had on an awful day a long time ago, and Jennifer thought to herself how the worst things that passed among people never really ended, but rolled on forever in ripples across time, eternally unanswered.

The odor of the bundle laid out across the backseat comes in waves that wrap me like the scent of guilt. Time draws me ever closer to the inevitable. Tear streaks dry on my misshapen face, forming a thin film over the painful contortions of my flesh. I sigh, step out of the car, and open the back door. Sand crunches beneath my feet. The slick, dark crests of the ocean roll and bend a short distance away. Remembrance ebbs back to me with the ripple-veiled clarity of languid surf; possibility gapes ahead of me like the far horizon of the sea on that dry, cloudless day that I first met Lynna Marish more than two decades ago.

* * * * *

A full-grown horseshoe crab lay wedged in a tiny gully among the rocks. It bobbed in the lapping water.

I crept down the slick boulders, stretching across the last length of space to reach the crab, struggling to keep my feet dry. Today was the first day of school, and Mom would kill me if I came home for breakfast with my new shoes soaked. She hadn’t wanted me to go down to the beach, but I couldn’t resist on such a beautiful morning. I’d spent the whole summer combing the sand and rocks, tracing Bossoquogue Creek from its outlet by the bay into the woods, swimming and diving, catching frogs, fish, and crabs, while I explored the waters and wilderness around Knicksport. I wasn’t ready for it to end.

School meant classes and being indoors, riding the bus, and facing the dumb meanness of people like Lester Smart, the track team star, and Julie Farrell, the class president, and all their hurtful imitators. It brought a close to days filled with seemingly endless hours of solitary wandering. It took me away from the water. The only good thing about high school that year was that our science course was biology, and we would get to dissect a starfish.

Over the summer I’d made friends among the clammers and oystermen who kept their boats moored in the harbor, quiet men who knew the texture of pain and pitied me. Some of them gave me a day’s work here and there, puttering around the bay, raking the bottom for harvest, silent and steady, the two of us sharing the isolation of a lonely job. When I was younger I dreamed of owning my own clam boat, but Mom despaired at the idea, warning me not to waste my good grades and brains on such a hard living. Better I should be a lawyer.

I found an airy piece of driftwood, used it to drag the horseshoe crab within reach, and flipped it over.

Dead.

It was so hard to find them alive. Their desiccated shells, legs bundled up tight beneath, often littered the beach like discarded helmets, their bayonet tails protruding behind them. I tugged on the narrow blade, tested its sharp point with my finger.

“
Limulus Polyphemus.
Class Merostomata, Order Xiphosura,” a voice said.

I turned, startled, to see a teenage girl a few feet away from me standing on a high rock. She was oddly dressed for the warm weather in baggy jeans, a long-sleeve turtle neck shirt, a floppy hat, and oversized, dark sunglasses. All I could see of her face was her broad nose and her wide, alluring smile.

“Hi,” I said.

“They don’t use their tail as a weapon, you know,” said the strange girl.

“I know. They use it like a rudder and to move around the bottom.”

“Oh. You know about horseshoe crabs?”

“Lots,” I told her. “Like they’ve been around for 500 million years. And doctors use one of the chemicals in their bodies to make vaccines and stuff.”

“How do you know so much?”

“Books, mostly. And I spend a lot of time wandering around the beach.”

“I like this beach,” she said. “It’s calmer and sandier than the one where I used to live.”

“Where’d you used to live?”

“Up north,” she said. “But me and my Grandma couldn’t live at home anymore, so we came here to stay with cousins. You lived here all your life?”

“Yeah, over on Pequash Road.”

“My name is Lynna.”

“I’m Dennis. So, I guess I’ll see you in school?”

She nodded. “Is it a good school?”

“It’s all right, I guess. I’d rather be at the beach.”

“Yeah, who wouldn’t?” she said. “Well, gotta run. See you later.”

Lynna jogged up the beach to the edge of the woods where she turned down the trail that led to the south end of Knicksport near the power plant. Maybe the sunglasses had hidden her expression, but she hadn’t shown any reaction at all to my disfigured face. Almost everyone did. I’d been caught in a chemical explosion while visiting my father at work; it killed him and disfigured me so badly that even when people pretended they didn’t notice, I could tell they did. I could see it in their eyes. Especially when the girls at school looked at me. Maybe Lynna would be different. The way she was dressed maybe she had her own strangeness to live with.

I saw her in school, but two weeks passed before we did more than say hello passing each other in the hallway. Everyday Lynna wore the same odd, heavy clothing, hat, and glasses, and it didn’t take long for the other kids to start teasing her about it. That was what they did best, after all: lash out at anything different from them, anything that challenged the fragile identities they were shaping for themselves, the lives they were building up out of cruelty and selfishness. It took me a long time to figure that out, to understand that all the abuse they heaped on me, all the hatred and foul will they doled out, had been the product of their weakness and stupidity, not mine.

One afternoon Lynna found me by the Bossoquogue sifting through reeds in search of frog eggs.

She said, “You told me it was a good school. I don’t think it’s a good school. Everyone’s mean there.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Guess you’re not having a good time.”

“Neither are you. I see how they treat you.”

“I’m used to it. These kids around here, I’ve known them all my life, you know? Some of them aren’t so bad. Some of them leave me alone.”

“That’s not right, either. Some of them should be your friends. Everyone needs friends. Doesn’t matter what you look like or how you act. Doesn’t matter where you’re from or who your family is.”

“Yeah, I suppose.”

“How about you and me be friends?”

I looked up from the reeds and smiled.

“Yeah, okay! You want to help me look for frog eggs?”

Lynna climbed down beside me and pried apart the reeds. She slipped her hand beneath the swirling water and raised it a moment later, drawing a thin, dark branch above the surface. Clustered along its edge were the nacreous bubbles of frog eggs.

She flashed me a wide smile. “Beat ya!”

* * * * *

My Mom mustered a fair amount of happiness and pride the day I graduated college despite my refusal to attend law school. I had earned a degree in marine biology and planned to go to graduate school and become an ichthyologist. It wasn’t what she wanted, but doubtless she was pleased to see me using my intelligence rather than wasting away in a lonely clam boat. Instead, starting in the fall, I would spend most of the next year on a research voyage out of San Blas, studying under Dr. Dagmar Skarsgård.

I returned to Knicksport for one last restless summer and spent too much time walking the town at night, wandering the beach, drifting along the calm, dark roads, inevitably wending my way to the house where Lynna had lived. There I would stand across the street and stare up at the darkened gables in the cold moonlight, wishing over the weed-choked lawn that she would look down upon me once more from her bedroom window. But she and her grandmother were long gone. Even most of Lynna’s cousins had grown up and moved on, slipping away from Knicksport with the barest hint of their leaving. Only one or two still lived in the old house, though hardly anyone in town had seen more than a glimpse of them in years. The sickness that ran through Lynna’s family was said to be potent and debilitating.

What a waste of warm days and bright sun that summer was. Days I could have been far away, chasing the things that I loved, the living mysteries and cold miracles that existed underwater, the rare species and creatures of the ocean’s lowest depths that I planned to study. I could think of no better way of beginning my life than by breaking cleanly from society, leaving behind my dry memories of home, casting myself to the whim of the currents for as long as I desired.

What I found there with Dagmar was an unexpected thing born of circumstance and common experiences rather than romance. She was twenty years my senior and had lost her husband, an engineer, to an oil rig accident in the North Sea two years earlier. Her pain was still fresh and she sought solace in her work, much as I did, though my aches, unlike hers, were timeworn and calloused. Confined to the
St. William
for so many months, I suppose it was unavoidable that we would seek haven in each other’s loneliness.

Once Dagmar told me that my hideousness appealed to her because it meant she could never love me. There was no malice in her words, only honesty of the kind we valued in each other as close companions. Her husband had been a strong and handsome man where I was not, and that was, for her, eternally, the face and figure of love. I believed I could never love anyone because I had no desire to leave my secret pains and festering wounds and impractical yearnings. Still, there was the persistence of physical need, and we were well suited to satisfy each other in that regard.

My time at sea, my time with Dagmar brought me confidence of a kind I had never before known. Among the scientific team I earned a good reputation for my work, which often surpassed that of the other graduate students. Within a few weeks’ time, the others’ awareness of my misshapen face vanished and I became just another student among the group, judged on my contributions to our research. By the end of the second month I felt among friends, accepted as an equal, even, perhaps, admired by some. On the open sea, immersed in my work, surrounded by unexpected comrades, a sense of wholeness took root in me for the first time in my life.

It was then, too, that Dagmar found what she was looking for, the kind of discovery made perhaps once a generation. And soon, I hated her for it.

* * * * *

Our biology class started starfish before Thanksgiving, and Lynna and I managed to get assigned as lab partners. For our classmates the project meant doing research at the library, but we already knew just about all there was to know about starfish, so instead we gathered books for our bibliography and then spent the chilly afternoons walking the beach. That late in the year, with the weather turning toward winter, Lynna’s clothing seemed less out of place, and some of the other kids had become friendlier toward her. She still wore her hat and sunglasses most of the time, but that was because of the disease she had inherited from her grandmother that made her skin photosensitive and allergic to many ordinary things.

The week our report was due Lynna invited me over to finish it. I was terrified of meeting her family, because Lynna thought they were strange and didn’t much care for living with them, but curiosity outweighed fear and my desire to spend time with Lynna trumped all my anxieties. Mom seemed more than a little surprised when I told her I would be going to visit a friend, especially a girl, and she made cupcakes for me to bring. It had been a long time since Mom had been invited anywhere.

The plate of cupcakes clutched in my hands, I followed the directions to Lynna’s house and found it on the south end of town, a couple of blocks from the power plant and the industrial neighborhood around it. The house was old and poorly maintained, the kind of hulking, once beautiful place common in the oldest parts of Knicksport. A film of dust coated the windows. The peaks of the third floor gables sagged. An iron lobster poked askew from the tip of a broken weathervane jutting from one end of the roof. The front porch creaked as I climbed the stairs and rang the doorbell.

Lynna answered a moment later and swept me into the dim foyer. She greeted me with a wide smile and a quick hug before she took the plate of cupcakes and led me into the house. Drawn curtains obscured every window and low wattage bulbs burned in the lamps. Every room we entered felt tenebrous and distanced from the outside world. Floors creaked above us with the passage of shuffling footsteps, water ran in the upstairs bathroom, a television clicked and chirped.

At home, enmeshed in the safety of the tired, old place, Lynna dressed very differently, her hat and glasses cast aside, her bulky clothing replaced by jeans and a light T-shirt fringed with delicate flowers of sky blue and corn yellow thread. She wore flip flops on her wide feet and wriggled her broad toes when she walked. Lynna unveiled was beautiful. Her body was slender and firm, her skin dusky and smooth, and her eyes were expressive eddies that looked at me with warmth and brightness. If the boys in our school could have seen Lynna in her house free of layers of cotton and wool, they would have fought each other for her attention. Lynna noticed my reaction, and I could tell it pleased her.

She left the cupcakes on the kitchen counter, then took my hand and brought me upstairs. We passed down a corridor slanted with age, its floorboards soft and warped. The sounds of Lynna’s unseen cousins grew louder, but all the doors remained closed. I trailed Lynna up a second flight of stairs to the cold third floor, where she ushered me into a spacious, icy room tinged with a strange dampness. A humidifier hummed beside the door, emitting wet vapors. A lamp glowed on a desk in the far corner, throwing feeble light onto someone reclining in a rumpled bed.