The Ghost Orchid (35 page)

When I open my eyes, I’m alone at the table. Everyone, even Zalman, is gone. For an instant I’m afraid that I’m still back in 1893, but then I hear their voices coming from the terrace. I get up, still unsteady on my feet, and walk over to the doorway, where Zalman’s chair is blocking the way out. I put my hands on his shoulders and lean over to see if he’s all right. He smiles back at me, the color returned to his cheeks and reason returned to his eyes—or at least I think so until he speaks.

“You set them free,” he says. “Look.”

I look out on the terrace where Nat, Bethesda, David, Daria, and Diana are all standing at the balustrade. Zalman angles his chair so I can get by him, and I walk across the terrace. The snow has been blown away, revealing deep cracks in the marble that I don’t remember being there before. When I join the group at the balustrade, Nat turns toward me and smiles—a smile so wide and open I’m startled. His eyes, I notice, are the same blue-green as Tom Quinn’s.

“David’s afraid it’s going to crack the pipes, but I don’t care if it brings the whole place down. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

I join him at the balustrade and look down on the garden. From beneath the snow a thousand jets of water shoot up into the night sky, the droplets turning to ice before they fall back to earth, glittering in the moonlight. All the fountains of Bosco have come to life at once.

“But how?”

David shakes his head. “It’s completely impossible,” he says, “and it can’t last. The pipes will burst—”

As he speaks I hear something explode like a firecracker and then another and another. All up and down the hill we hear the sound of old copper pipes bursting under the snow. And then the hill begins to crumble. At first I think it’s an illusion—another one of Bosco’s water tricks—but then I realize I dreamed this once a long time ago. The gardens are caving in, sinking before our eyes, and still the water leaps into the sky. I hear again the sound I’d heard in the bog just before I lost consciousness. The beating of wings. A thousand birds rising to the sky as one. I look up, and for just a moment I see them—a flock of red-winged blackbirds silhouetted against the moon—and then they turn into crystal drops that evaporate in the night air.

Chapter Thirty

Alice beats them back to the cabin because Mr. Quinn is slowed down carrying Miss—

Not Miss Blackwell. She said that she was her mother. That Alice didn’t belong to the Lathams. Well, she’s never felt that she belonged to them. But then who was the baby buried in the bog? Elmira? The name on the tree that her brothers and sister had laughed at?

Alice makes the fire and boils water. She’ll need tea. She looked so weak when she fell. Alice fixes the pot and rinses the cup out with hot water, but as she’s washing it she stares at the name on the bottom.
Alice.
If she’s Miss Blackwell’s daughter, then she’s not Alice Latham. And if she’s not Alice Latham, then Alice Latham must be the baby at the bottom of the bog. Then what’s her name? Who is she?

Her hands are shaking as she pours the boiling water from the heavy iron kettle into the teapot and then pours the tea into the blue and white cup. She picks up the cup and saucer just as the cabin door opens and she sees from the look on Mr. Quinn’s face that it’s too late—that the tea won’t help at all—and so she lets the cup and saucer drop from her hands. Lets them shatter on the hard wood floor. Why not? She’s not Alice anymore. She doesn’t need Alice’s cup.

But when she looks down, she sees that the only part of the broken cup that has remained is the bottom circle with her name on it.

I pause, my hands hovering over my laptop keys like those dragonflies hovered over the bog in my vision. I look down and see an actual dragonfly land on the pond just below the dock where I’m sitting. I watch it flit across the sparkling green water like a sentient emerald. When Nat and I came here this past winter, I couldn’t have imagined that the black water could turn this color green. Or that the bog could be transformed from a place of darkness and shadow into this gorgeous floating world. Of course, I hadn’t imagined that I’d come back here with Nat. That it was Nat whom I wanted—and who wanted me—and not David. Still, when Nat asked me if I wanted to spend the summer here finishing my novel, I wasn’t sure if I should say yes. I knew he still wasn’t writing and I was afraid that seeing me work all day might make him . . . well, jealous. The old Nat would have been jealous. But the new Nat, the one who’s emerged since the séance, merely smiled at my worries and asked me, “Where else are you going to finish this story? It’s where it ends, right?”

But it’s the ending that’s been giving me the most trouble. I can’t seem to get past the moment when Corinth dies. The irony that it’s the one moment of the past that I’ve actually experienced that’s not lost on me.

I sigh and lower my eyes back to my screen and, because it’s gone black, tap the mouse pad like a lab technician palpating flesh to raise a vein, and then stare at the words that rise up out of the black screen. Yes, Alice breaks the teacup and then asks Tom to wedge the part with her name on it into the tamarack tree. It’s her way of leaving the name behind and leaving something for the lost baby, whom she thinks of as a sort of sister. She gives the baby in the bog her name and takes the name Elmira—or a variant of it that resembles her original name. Which would explain why in 1893, a few months after Alice Latham disappeared from Bosco, a ten-year-old girl named Ellis Brooks, with her seventeen-year-old sister, Elmira, moved to Lily Dale, New York.

“My mother,” Mira told me over tea in Mrs. London’s Teashop in Saratoga last week when she came to visit, “always said that Elmira was a family name. She was adamant that I take it, and when I had you, she made such a fuss about giving it to you that I figured I’d better do it. She was right about most things. But I always wondered about
Elmira
and
Ellis.
Of course it wasn’t uncommon for girls to have different versions of their mothers’ names, so maybe your great-grandmother was really ‘Elmira.’ I can’t find a birth certificate for her, so we’ll probably never know.”

The reason there wasn’t a birth certificate, I’m fairly sure now, is that ten-year-old Ellis Brooks, my great-grandmother, was Alice Latham. She was the right age when the sisters moved to Lily Dale and she appeared out of nowhere. Mira brought with her to the tea shop a copy of the 1890 census for Erie County listing only one daughter, age fourteen, living with the Brooks family on Forest Avenue in Buffalo. Where else would a ten-year-old daughter come from just three years later?

“Of course she was Corinth’s daughter,” Mira said, taking a delicate sip of the house blend, a lavender-scented Earl Grey that I could have sworn my mother picked to match her outfit: a lavender linen shift with a deeper lilac sweater tied across her shoulders and amethyst crystal drops hanging from her ears. The color suited her and what was more, while the outfit was not radically different from her usual garb, it looked somehow better cut and more expensive. When Mira retied the sweater, I noticed an Eileen Fisher label on the neckline. “My grandmother always said that her mother was a famous medium,” Mira continued, “and that they’d had to leave Buffalo because the neighbors complained about ‘strange noises’ coming from the house at night. Well, I had a look through the archives of the Buffalo newspaper and found that there was, indeed, an article about neighbors complaining about rapping noises coming from the Brooks house on Forest Avenue. The reporter compared the incident to the Fox sisters back in the 1840s, but what’s interesting is that the rapping at the Brookses began in the fall of 1893.”

“When Alice would have arrived.”

“Yes, the article mentions two young sisters and says that they had decided to seek out a ‘more sympathetic’ community in Lily Dale, where an aunt and uncle of theirs lived—”

“An aunt and uncle? You never mentioned that your grandmother was brought up by an aunt and uncle.”

“Didn’t I?” Mira asked, tilting her head to one side. “Of course, they were both very old when I was born and died soon after.”

“They were still alive when you were born? Do you remember them? Are there any pictures?”

Mira looked up to the ceiling as if trying to discern a likeness to her ancestors in its stamped-tin pattern of vine and flower. “I do remember she had very beautiful hands,” she said, a vague, dreamy expression stealing over her face, “but she always wore gloves when she went out except . . . Oh, my, you know, I haven’t thought of this in years . . .”

“What?” I said, leaning forward so impatiently that I knocked my teacup out of its saucer and onto the floor, where the delicate china shattered. The teenaged girl behind the counter hurried over with a whisk and dustpan, and I knelt on the floor to help her collect the broken pieces. When I took my seat again, I saw that Mira’s attention had drifted toward the front of the shop.

“There’s an adorable man looking this way and waving with a handkerchief,” she said. “Do you know him?”

An adorable man
? When in the world had my mother ever referred to a man as
adorable
? I looked behind me and saw Zalman Bronsky, in a very handsome white linen suit, leaning on the silver-tipped cane he’d used since his cast came off, saluting us with his handkerchief as if he were signaling from the deck of a yacht. He looked, indeed, as if he could have just sailed in a regatta at Newport. He looked, I had to agree, adorable.

“That’s Zalman Bronsky, the poet; he’s one of the guests at Bosco. You know, the one who broke his leg last winter? Diana Tate extended his stay while his leg is still healing.”

“Oh, the man who writes such lovely poems about Madame Blavatsky. Don’t you think we should ask him over? There are no other free tables and he oughtn’t to stand too long on his injured leg.”

Put that way, I could hardly object. Nor could I help but offer to get Zalman his tea and pastry. When I came back to the table, I found that my mother and Zalman had discovered that in addition to Madame Blavatsky they shared a passion for Pythagoras and were happily discussing the Greek philosopher’s vegetarianism and ability to talk to animals. I stayed for a while, but when Zalman offered to show Mira the springs in Congress Park, I realized that I’d become a bit of a third wheel. I pleaded work as an excuse for heading back to the cabin. When I kissed my mother good-bye, I noticed that Mira had also changed her perfume. Instead of patchouli she was wearing a light floral scent that smelled like roses and vanilla. I left Zalman and Mira on Broadway and drove back to the cabin in Nat’s beat-up old Saab. Only later did I realize that I never found out what Mira remembered about her great-great-aunt’s hands.

Now, on the dock, I flex my own hands over the laptop. When I brought up the anecdote on the phone with my mother later, Mira said that her memory must have been playing tricks on her. The image of the glove-wearing great-great-aunt had slipped away. If she remembered anything else, though, she’d tell me when she came to town in August, when, she told me with an uncharacteristically girlish lilt in her voice, Zalman and she were going to the races. I haven’t heard from my mother since and I’m not counting on any more revelations. Clearly my mother is busy thinking about other things and I would be the last one to begrudge her—or Zalman—some happiness. The glove-wearing great-great-aunt was probably nothing more than what Mira called it: a trick of memory.

When I look down I see that my laptop’s screen has gone black again, but instead of resuscitating it, I snap the lid shut and slide it into my backpack. I look back toward the house and see that Nat’s on the front porch, where he’s set up his typewriter on an old card table. As usual he’s got his feet up on the card table and he’s staring out into the distance. Clearly he’s not writing, but still I don’t want to disturb him in case inspiration is about to alight. I decide to take a walk into the bog instead. Maybe if I go back to the spot by the tamarack tree and sit there long enough, I’ll finally be able to write the scene of Corinth’s death and its aftermath.

I take the path into the bog, stopping to pick some bog laurel and peppermint, which I use when I make iced tea. Nat swears it has the same smoky undertone of a good Laphroaig, which is as close as he gets to the scotch these days. Although Diana Tate offered him a bottle to celebrate selling the cabin to him when he left Bosco, Nat turned it down. “I’m sure David will make good use of it,” he said with only a hint of his old sarcasm in his voice.

Even though the destruction of the garden had discouraged the Garden Conservancy from funding the restoration (“They don’t like it when a garden is in
worse
shape after the conservator has a go at it,” David had told me on my last visit to Bosco), David and Bethesda decided to stay at Bosco to write a history of the gardens together. I’ve gone back a few times to visit them and Zalman and to see if the ruined garden would inspire me to write this last scene, but the last time I was there I felt sure that the end of the story wasn’t there. I’m beginning to wonder, though, if it’s here.

I find the toppled tamarack tree, which has already turned a reddish brown in the water since it fell last winter. If I lean over the water, I can just catch a glimpse of the china plaque with Alice’s name on it. Soon, though, it will be covered with moss and hidden from sight, swallowed by the bog just as baby Alice was.

I sit down on a bed of sphagnum moss by the water’s edge. I’m not afraid of seeing her anymore. Since the séance I’ve felt she’s at peace. But what about Corinth? I unleashed her spirit from Wanda’s spell and let her tell Tom that Alice—or Elmira—was their child. Was it enough? Had it satisfied her spirit? I close my eyes and listen to the birdsong in the trees and the croaking of mink frogs and the whir of insects in the bog. I can even hear water dripping into pitcher plants and soaking into the emerald carpet of moss beneath me and draining into the mat that floats over the bog’s deep underground pool. I feel as if I’m floating, but I can’t feel Corinth here. And yet, wouldn’t they have buried her here—with the baby?

I open my eyes and see something white beside my foot. Even before I pick it up I know by its scent that it’s a ghost orchid, not growing, but loose, as if someone picked it and left it here. I pick it up to take back to Nat, but when I arrive at the cabin, I hear a tapping that I think, at first, is a woodpecker, but then realize is the sound of Nat’s typewriter. So I slip inside and put the orchid into a glass bowl of water.