The Little Giant of Aberdeen County (39 page)
Marcus eased away from me. “You don’t get it, Truly.
I’ll
always know, and you will, too. There will always be ghosts between us. You’ll see.”
Isn’t that part of love,
I wanted to ask,
carrying someone else’s ghosts for them?
But before I could, he wheeled around on his good leg and hobbled across the grass, leaving a ragged, vegetative trail I was sorry I could not follow.
Much has been documented about the soul’s response to death, but I think the human body’s reaction is just as inscrutable. Is it such an outlandish concept, I wonder, to imagine that the body has its own rituals and protocols for loss and that those rites remain mysterious and distant from what goes on in our minds? And maybe it’s necessary and proper that they should be so, for without that gap, we would probably never let ourselves be transformed. I know I wouldn’t have, but I didn’t get to make that choice—or maybe I should say I didn’t have to make it. Either way, something began happening to me right after the doctor died.
He’d given me the name of a new doctor in Hansen—a Dr. Redfield. He was a man about the same age as Robert Morgan who’d worked in Albany for years but liked country life better. “I’ve given him copies of all your records,” Robert Morgan assured me a few weeks before he died, “and he knows all about your case. He can provide you with your medication, and oversee your symptoms. He’ll even travel out to the house. Just call him.”
A few days after the doctor’s funeral, I found the number and began to dial. I still had about a week’s worth of medicine, but I would need to get more, and sometimes it could take a few days. As I was about to push the last button on the phone, however, I caught a glimpse of myself in the foyer’s oval mirror, but where a glimpse was all I could ever catch of myself before, this time I found that the narrow frame was able to hold my entire reflection. I examined the newly bared planes of my cheeks, tilting my face first one way, then the other, then lifting my chin to see how much more neck I had. The fresh summer air licked and tickled my throat, and I shivered.
Is this how it is for everyone,
I wondered,
to be so plain to the world?
I remembered when Marcus had comforted me after Miss Sparrow had taken my mother’s mirror. What was it he had said? That reflections were just little particles of light? I liked that idea—that even I consisted of tiny fragments that could be rearranged.
As if in a trance, I slowly lowered the receiver back into its cradle and dropped the paper with Dr. Redfield’s number. I turned my face from side to side, but every angle confirmed what I suspected. I had shrunk a little. I couldn’t imagine how it was possible, especially since the doctor had told me I would keep increasing in size, but the mirror wasn’t lying. Instead of spreading as wide and thick as the chestnut tree outside of the schoolhouse, here I was with the flesh on me limning the general shape of my bones. I rushed upstairs and dug the farm clothes from my youth out of the back of my closet, and for some inscrutable reason, they fit again, the plaid flannel and soft denim nestling against my skin like old, familiar sheets.
To celebrate, I gathered up all the balloonlike rayon dresses I’d worn over the years, balled them together in the downstairs fireplace, and watched them singe and cinder. It was so satisfying watching them burn that before I half knew it, I’d gathered up a whole other load of junk and set fire to it, too. Recipe cards, the yellowed stacks of magazines from my room, the dried flowers off the parlor mantel—all of them went up in smoke. The next morning, I washed the quilt in lavender soap and hung it in the sun to dry, its wet batting pulling the line low. I took down the curtains to wash them, too, but decided the windows looked better without them, so I rolled them into a ball, shoved them in the fireplace, and ignited them. I added the flattened needlepoint pillows off the sofa—grungy from years of dust—and the doilies off the backs of the chairs and then ran for dear life when the room erupted in a choking cloud of noxious smoke. When I finally got up the courage to reenter the parlor, the fire had gentled down to a glowing heap of ash, and the floorboards in front of the hearth were pitted and scarred from live embers.
By week’s end, I had burned the oilskin from off the kitchen table, the ancient pack of playing cards August had given me in childhood, and most of the doctor’s clothes. My fires grew too noxious and large for the little hearth in the parlor, so I moved my operation outside and set off my blazes in Marcus’s flower beds, pleased to see them scorch, too.
Serves him right,
I thought, though for what, I couldn’t really say. Every day, I came up with a different reason.
Who knows how much more I would have burned if I hadn’t burned myself first? Again, it’s the old lesson of bitterness eliciting like. To anyone else, I would have looked like a larger-than- average woman clearing the detritus of decades out of a house no one had much use for anymore, but if you’d come closer, you might have been disturbed by the way the reflected flames danced and leapt in my eyes. You would have noticed me standing smoke side to the fires when I didn’t have to, just so I could gulp in one more acrid taste of the past before it floated upward without me. With every crackle and snap of heat, I could feel myself getting tighter and smaller, until I felt so immune to the world’s ills that I grew reckless. I fed the fires higher and higher until one afternoon a rogue ember burned a crescent into my palm.
Hissing with pain, I went to the dispensary, to see if the doctor had any old cream or balm. Away from the fire, my cheeks cooled and tingled, even though the air was moist. The center of my hand throbbed and beat—a rhythm my temples picked up and began to copy. With my good hand, I groped along the top of the doorjamb for the hidden key, then shoved open the screen door and unlocked the doctor’s office. It was the one place I had avoided since his death, and even though it had been only about a week, the air inside was as thick and stale as old rubber. I groped my way to the light switch and flicked it on.
I opened the door to the medicine cabinet and found a sample tube of antibiotic cream and a roll of gauze. Winding the white fabric around my hand, I continued to inspect the room. The doctor and Amelia had pretty well cleaned it out at the beginning of his illness. His desk was bare of his usual files and folders, and he’d either destroyed all his old patient records or sent them on to the clinic in Hansen. I idly pulled open one of the metal drawers and was surprised to see a few files remaining. One of them was Priscilla Sparrow’s, and one of them was mine.
Mine was so thick that I had trouble holding the whole thing in one hand. I flipped it open and right away saw a decade’s worth of blood test results, measurements, and other numbers. I scanned through this information quickly, not daring to let myself put an actual number to my weight and height after all these years. I still didn’t want to know. The back of the folder held his notes, and I read these more thoroughly.
Subject recalcitrant,
one sentence read.
Refuses to follow dietary advice.
I turned the page.
Subject’s bone structure more in keeping with a male’s. Subject shows increased musculature. Subject’s heart shows evidence of gross enlargement. Prognosis poor.
I sighed and shoved the papers back into the folder, then set the folder on top of the filing cabinet. The doctor’s history of me was like a faulty, oversized shadow. One more thing to be burned.
On the wall above the doctor’s desk, his books still held all their old posts on the shelf. Anatomy texts, drug indexes—there were enough words, I thought, to write the human body into existence ten times over, a hundred different ways. I ran my fingers down the spines of the books then back again. Each time, my fingers kept hooking on the last book in the row. It was slightly out of kilter with the other volumes, as if someone had recently taken it off the shelf. I peered at it more closely. Someone
had
taken it down. I scowled. Who could it have been? The doctor? But he hadn’t left his bed before his death. Bobbie had keys to the house, but as far as I knew, he hadn’t been back. That left only Amelia. But she hadn’t been in the doctor’s office since he’d died, I didn’t think, and it would have been totally unlike her to move only one item in a room and then not clean it up properly.
Curious, I fanned the pages open in my hand. Pen-and-ink drawings—precise and delicate as spiderwebs—wavered, depicting all the mysteries of the body. The beefy heart. Clusters of cauliflower buds on the lungs. Blood vessels that narrowed into fronds of capillaries, looking more like ferns than part of the flesh. But then something stuck in between the pages caught my eye. A small bit of paper—the corner of an envelope. I plucked it out and held it up, and then gasped. It was a return address, and the name I was reading, in very familiar handwriting, was my sister’s.
What was a letter from my sister doing in Robert Morgan’s bookcase, I wondered, and when would she have had the occasion to send him a letter? As far as I could remember, they’d never been apart after their marriage until she’d left him. I took down the next book and flipped through it, but there was nothing—just pages of ink. I did the same with all the other books, until the desk behind me was full, but there was no other sign of any correspondence from my sister. Bewildered, I stared down at the scrap of paper again and saw what I hadn’t before. The envelope had been torn so that half the address was missing, but there was enough left for me to make out some of the words—
11 Palm
something—and the state that the letter had been sent from.
California.
All the air left my body, and I slumped against the desk. I remembered what the doctor had said the night he died. Had he really been talking about Serena Jane? It didn’t make any sense, though. My sister lay in the Aberdeen cemetery, boxed, buried, and weighted down right next to all the other Morgans. I could go there anytime I wanted and touch the heavy block of stone with her name on it. But the grieving mind is an irrational thing. It tricks us, overlooks details, stops paying attention halfway through the story, and thus ignores all other potential endings.
Seized with curiosity, I yanked open the center drawer of the doctor’s desk and dug around. Except for a few yellowed receipts, it was empty. Same with all the other drawers, except the last one. There, underneath a copy of his will, which I’d already gone over, was something I never even knew existed—the deed to the Dyerson farm. I pulled it out and examined it. What I was holding was a copy, I surmised, and it had been amended several times. At one point, the doctor had possessed the farm, I saw with surprise, but now, under
Owner,
there was a new name, one I never really expected to see scrawled on a Morgan document.
Amelia Ann Dyerson
.
Like a frame stilled from a moving picture, an image of Amelia frozen halfway up the stepladder in the doctor’s office with a bundle of papers in her hand suddenly stuck in the reel of my mind. I remembered all her recent stop-and-start, partial confessions, her paleness when I’d brought up the topic of California at the doctor’s graveside, and instead of the anger I expected, I felt the blood run as cool and calculating through my veins as Robert Morgan’s had done in his life. Amelia had had something to do with the disappearance of my sister’s letters and the secret of her existence—the only thing I didn’t know was why, and I wasn’t sure I cared to, either. Some betrayals are so huge, nothing can ever whittle them down.
Locking up the doctor’s office and sliding the key back into its hiding place, the mysterious scrap of paper tucked safely in my pocket, I began racing through a mental slew of wild possibilities. What if my sister was still alive? What if I could find her again? What if Bobbie could have his mother back? Was there such a thing as redemption?
Outside, evening had begun to come on. The first bats were tickling the pale sky, and the fireflies were getting ready to light themselves up and dance. It was still hot, though. Across the yard, my fire had mellowed but gave out an occasional crackle, like something alive. The burn on my palm throbbed, keeping time with the blood pounding in my temples, my ears, and I knew for certainty that my heart was shrinking and that I would take Amelia down with it.
S
ome people, when confronted with a mystery, will go forth immediately and scour the earth for answers, overturning furniture, comparing the angles of doors and windows, checking under flower pots, certain they’re on the right path. Maybe they’re impatient, or maybe they’ve read too many detective stories. They’ve gotten so accustomed to getting the solution that they think it’s their natural-born right. It never occurs to them there might not be one—not a good one, at least. Not one that makes any sense. Me, I’ve never been a big reader. I figure that if a secret has an answer, it’ll out on its own if it’s meant to, and if it doesn’t, then maybe providence has a better reason for keeping it hidden than you think. But some mysteries are too big for one person to hold on to for long, and some are too tantalizing to let lie fallow, and those are the worst kind of all, for they end up being the real heartbreakers. They are the ones where once you know the story, you wish you didn’t.
I didn’t go chasing after the truth right away—it was like the burn on my hand. Too recent, too raw, still oozing and sore. It needed time to set and heal before I went digging in the coals again. I needed to grow a second skin. To compensate, to keep my mind tethered to the present, I continued my efforts of cleaning out the doctor’s house. I ventured into the attic and dug through all the boxes and trunks, setting aside any treasures I thought might be valuable. I polished the banister and the mahogany dining table and chairs. I even got out a toolbox and tightened up the washers on all the sinks.
The burned spot on my palm gradually turned into a congealed, red lump of a scar, but it itched like the dickens. Nothing I put on it—the doctor’s cream, petroleum jelly—helped. So one afternoon, I threw whatever calming herbs I could think of—chamomile, mint, comfrey—into a pot and brewed out the oils, catching them with one of the doctor’s glass beakers. Then I mixed all of that into some softened beeswax, and spread it on my hand. Immediately, my skin settled down and felt cool and regular, and in a week, the scar was beginning to fade. I’d promised myself that I was done with the quilt, but this wasn’t technically going back on my word, I figured. I had made up this mixture on my own. Still, it was close enough to Tabby’s cures for me to fold up the quilt and put it away in the back of the linen closet.
You’ve been enough trouble,
I said to it.
History’s done with you now
.
