The Winter People (13 page)

“It’s true! Ask anyone. There were some weird deaths, and people blamed Sara—or whatever it was walking around in her skin. So everyone in the village started leaving gifts out on their porches for her—food and coins, jars of honey. She’d walk through town collecting them late at night. Every full moon, the whole town would put stuff out for her. Some people, old-timers like Sally Jensen out on Bulrush Road? They’re still doing it.”

Ruthie shook her head in disbelief. “No way!”

“I’ll prove it. Next full moon, you and I will take a ride around town. I’ll show you the offerings set out here and there on porches and doorsteps.”

“So how come I’ve never heard any of this before?”

He shrugged, set down his empty beer bottle, and leaned back into the bed, hands clasped behind his head. “I guess people don’t talk about it all that much. My grandpa only mentioned it once, when he was good and drunk one Thanksgiving. He was legitimately scared.”

Ruthie shook her head, lay back in the bed beside Buzz, and closed her eyes. It had been a long, exhausting day. She just needed to rest for a minute.

Suddenly she was back in Fitzgerald’s, holding her mother’s hand. The fluorescent light was flickering above them, growing steadily dimmer.

“What do you choose, Dove?” asked her mother, who held her hand a little too tightly. The bakery seemed to be shrinking around them, the walls closing in.

Ruthie stared at the rows of cakes and cookies and pointed at the pink cupcake. The ceiling was lower now.

Then she looked up to see her mother smiling down. And it was the stranger again—a tall, thin woman with tortoiseshell-framed glasses shaped like cat’s eyes. The bakery wasn’t much bigger than a closet now, and everything had gotten very dark. The only source of light was the glass case that held the cupcakes, which seemed to sparkle and glow.

Ruthie felt that old familiar panic at being in such a small, tight place. She was breathing too fast, doing an openmouthed panting like a dog.

“Good choice, Dove,” the woman said, then reached around the back of her head and pulled on a zipper. Her whole mommy disguise came peeling off, leaving a sack of red oozing flesh with a hole for a mouth.

Ruthie tried to scream, but couldn’t. She gasped herself awake, heart hammering.

She blinked hard. She and Buzz were lying on her mom’s bed, on top of the covers. Buzz was snoring softly. The light was still on, glaring down like an eye. She caught movement off to her right side—something in the closet. She turned; a shadow moved. The cat? No, it was too big to be Roscoe. She sat up, drawing in a sharp breath; from the back corner of the closet she saw the glint of two eyes.

Buzz bolted up in bed, body rigid. “Whatisit?”

Ruthie pointed to the closet, hand shaking. “There’s something in there,” she told him, her throat almost too dry to speak. “Watching us.”

Buzz had his feet on the floor in two seconds and the crowbar in his hand. He bounded to the closet, swept back the clothes on hangers.

“Nothing here,” he said, after a second.

Ruthie shook her head, rolled out of bed, and approached the closet cautiously. There was nothing but the familiar rows of shoes, her parents’ clothing on hangers. But something was different. The air in the closet felt strange—crackling and used up. And there was
an odd acrid, burning odor—something familiar to her, but she couldn’t say where she’d smelled it before.

“Maybe it was just a bad dream?” Buzz said, ruffling her hair.

“Yeah, maybe,” she said, and closed the closet door hard, wishing she could lock it.

Visitors from the Other Side The Secret Diary of Sara Harrison Shea

January 15, 1908

Things have become so very strange—I feel as though I am floating outside my body, watching myself and those around me with the same curiosity as if I were watching actors on a stage. Our kitchen table is piled high with food the women bring: brown bread, baked beans, smoked ham, potpies, potato soup, gingerbread, apple crisp, fruitcake soaked in rum. The smell of the food sickens me. All I can think is how much Gertie would have loved it all—fresh gingerbread topped with whipped cream! But Gertie is gone, and the food keeps coming.

I see myself nod, shake people’s hands, accept their hugs and food and kind gestures. Claudia Bemis has cleaned the house from top to bottom and kept the coffeepot full. The men have split kindling, carried in bundles of firewood, kept the dooryard shoveled.

Lucius has stayed right by Martin’s side. The two of them spent much of yesterday in the barn together, building Gertie’s coffin.

These past two days, so many people have come to pay respects, to say how sorry they are. Their words are hollow. Empty. Soundless bubbles rising to the surface of the water.

Gertie is with the angels now
.

We’re praying for you
.

The schoolteacher, Delilah Banks, came calling. “Gertie had the most fanciful thoughts,” she said through tears. “I can’t tell you how very much I will miss her.”

One teary-eyed face after another, a chorus of voices low and somber:
So sorry. We’re so, so very sorry
.

I do not wish for their sympathy—what I want is my Gertie back, and if no one can give me that, then, as far as I’m concerned, the world can just go away and take their tears and potpies and gingerbread with them.

Poor old Shep has taken up residence at the foot of Gertie’s chair in the kitchen. He lies there all day, looking hopeful each time he hears someone enter the room, only to rest his head mournfully on his front paws when he sees it is not Gertie.

“Poor love,” my niece, Amelia, says, getting down on her knees to stroke the dog’s head and feed him choice scraps. Amelia has been very kind. She has insisted on staying with us for a few days to help with things. She is twenty-one, very striking, strong-willed.

Last night, she brought me some warm brandy before bed and insisted I drink the whole cup. “Uncle Lucius says it’ll do you good,” she explained.

Then she took up my brush and began to work the tangles out of my hair. I haven’t had my hair brushed for me since I was a little girl.

“Can I tell you a secret?” Amelia asked.

I nodded.

“The dead never really leave us,” she whispered to me, her lips so near my ear I could feel the warmth of her breath. “There is a circle of ladies in Montpelier who meet once a month and speak with those who have passed on. I have been several times now, and heard the spirits rapping on the table. You must come with me, Aunt Sara,” she said, her voice growing urgent. “As soon as you feel up to it, we will go.”

“Martin would not approve,” I said.

“Then we won’t tell him,” she whispered.

M
artin has been no comfort—he is shy, clumsy, and awkward. Once, I found these things sweetly boyish and endearing; now I find myself wishing that he were a different man, a man more sure of himself. I have come to despise the way he never looks anyone in the eye—how is a man like that to be trusted? There
was a time, not all that long ago, I even loved his limp, because in some way it reminded me of everything he’d given our family—his constant drive to keep us warm and fed, to keep the farm going no matter what. Now I loathe the way his bad foot scrapes across the floor so noisily; it is the sound of weakness and failure. I know it’s wrong, and it makes me sick, this new seething venom inside me, but I cannot help it.

Deep down, I understand the true cause of these feelings: I blame Martin for what happened to Gertie. If she hadn’t followed him into the woods that morning, she would still be here by my side.

“We will see our way through this,” he tells me, squeezing my hand in his own, which is as cool and damp as a fish. He gives me a warm, loving smile, but behind it I see his concern.

I do not answer. I do not tell him that I no longer wish to get through it. That what I want most is to sneak away and throw myself down into the bottom of that well so I can be with my Gertie once more.

Even Reverend Ayers can offer no relief.

He came this afternoon to discuss the service and burial arrangements for Gertie. I had been putting off this discussion, but today Martin and Lucius announced that it was time, we had waited long enough.

We sat at the table over cups of coffee that grew cold before us. Reverend Ayers had brought a basket of muffins his wife, Mary, had made. There was some talk of burying Gertie up at the cemetery by Cranberry Meadow with Martin’s family, but I wouldn’t have it.

“She belongs here,” I said. Martin nodded, and Lucius opened his mouth to say something but thought better of it. And so it was decided we would bury her in the small family plot behind the house, beside her tiny brother, my mother and father and brother.

As Reverend Ayers was leaving, he took my hand. “You must remember, Sara, that Gertie is in a better place now. She’s with our Lord.”

I spat in his face.

I did this without thinking, automatically, as if it were as natural to me as taking a sip of water when thirsty.

Imagine, me spitting in Reverend Ayers’s face! I’ve known the
man all my life—he baptized me, married Martin and me, buried our son, Charles. I have struggled all my life to believe his teachings, to live the word of God. But no more.

“Sara!” Lucius said, looking alarmed as he pulled a clean white handkerchief out of the front pocket of his trousers and handed it to the reverend.

Reverend Ayers wiped at his face and stepped back away from me. He looked … not angry or worried about me, but frightened of what I might do next.

“If the God you worship and pray to is the one who brought my Gertie to that well, who took her from me, then I want nothing more to do with him,” I said. “Please leave my house and take your vicious God with you.”

Poor Martin was horrified and stuttered off excuses for me.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, as he and Lucius walked Reverend Ayers out. “She’s sick with grief. Not in her right mind.”

Not in my right mind.

But I am in the same mind I have had all along. Only now there is a piece missing. A Gertie-shaped piece cut from the center of my very being.

And perhaps, with this new grief, I am seeing things clearly for the first time.

I understand now that Martin has never known the real me. There is only one person who ever did—who saw all of me, all the beauty along with the ugliness. And it is that person I long for now.

Auntie.

For so long, I have done my best to push all my memories of her away. I’ve spent my whole adult life trying to convince myself that she got what she deserved; that her death, terrible as it was, was the consequence of her own actions. But that’s never been what I truly believed. What I think about most is how I should have done something to stop it. If I had found a way to save her, I tell myself, maybe my life might have turned out differently. Perhaps all the tragedy and loss I have suffered is somehow linked to what I did that one day when I was nine.

It’s funny that she is the person I long for most in times like these, when my heart has been shattered and I see no sense in going on.