Kathleen also introduced me to the local library and to the Internet. She couldn’t believe that I didn’t use a computer at home. The two in the basement were devoted to my father’s and Dennis’s research, but I’d never thought of asking to use them.
And I didn’t use them that summer. We had too many other things to do. We took longer and longer bike rides, out to the Yaddo Rose Garden and beyond, to the lake. At first I couldn’t go as far or as fast as she could, but my stamina grew over time. I suffered my first sunburn, which gave me a fever and a rash so severe that my father called in Dr. Wilson, who gave me a lecture and sent me to bed for two days; after that, I religiously applied the SPF 50 sunscreen from the enormous bottle Root had placed on my bedroom dresser, giving me a glance of utter contempt as she did so.
I had a less violent reaction to my first kiss. One evening a group of us went to the lake to watch fireworks. The others kept swatting at flies and mosquitoes, but insects never bothered me. I moved a little apart from the others, to see better, and when I took my eyes from the sky, Michael stood next to me. I saw the reflection of a shower of ruby-red stars in his eyes as he kissed me.
You’re right — I haven’t described Michael, have I? I think he was sixteen that summer — a boy of medium height, with dark brown hair, brown eyes, and tanned skin. He spent as much time as he could outdoors, biking and swimming. He was muscular, lean, with a deadpan expression that stayed on his face even when he told jokes, which was often. Occasionally he snuck cigarettes from his father’s supply, and I remember the smell of tobacco. Is that enough? I think that’s enough about him.
July melted into August, and all the McG kids were getting ready to return to school — shopping for notebooks and pens, getting dental exams, having their hair cut, talking about teachers. One day a cold wind blew in from Canada, bringing Saratoga Springs an unmistakable hint that summer wouldn’t last forever.
Perhaps that knowledge made me irritable, I thought. Or perhaps I was missing Dennis, my father’s assistant; he was in Japan conducting research that month. Since I’d been a baby he’d had a special fondness for me. I thought of how he’d carried me around on his broad shoulders, pretending to be a horse, and how he’d made me laugh. He called himself my “fine freckled friend.” He’d be back with us in a few weeks, and that thought would have to console me for now.
I forced myself to read a collection of poetry by Edgar Allan Poe, and it was tough going. I’d suffered through The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which seemed to me painfully overwritten. But the poetry was even worse. In an hour my father would be upstairs, expecting me to have insights into meter and rhyme, and all I could think about was that Michael (and Kathleen) were out shopping, and that I wouldn’t see them at all that day.
Mrs. McG had made me an omelet for lunch, so watery and tasteless that I couldn’t make myself eat more than a few bites of it. I wondered why her cooking tasted so much better at her house.
When I met my father in the library at one, I said, “You know, I don’t think much of Poe’s poetry.”
He was sitting at the desk, and one of his eyebrows lifted. “And how much of it have you read, Ariella?”
“Enough to know that I don’t like it.” I talked quickly, to hide the truth: I’d read the first and last stanzas and skimmed the rest. I tried to explain. “The words are just…words on the page.”
“Which one were you reading?” How like him, to know I’d read only one.
I opened the book and handed it to him. “‘Annabel Lee,’” he said, his voice caressing the name. “Oh, Ari. I don’t think you’ve read it at all.”
And he read the poem aloud to me, barely glancing at the book, never pausing between the lines or stanzas, and the words were like music, the saddest song in the world. When he read the final lines (“And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side / Of my darling — my darling — my life and my bride / In her sepulchre there by the sea — / In her tomb by the sounding sea.”), I was crying. And when he looked up from the book, I saw tears in his eyes.
He recovered quickly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Poe was a bad choice.”
But I couldn’t stop crying. Embarrassed, I left him and went upstairs, lines of the poem still sounding in my head: “For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams / Of the beautiful ANNABEL LEE; / And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes / Of the beautiful ANNABEL LEE.”
I fell onto my bed and cried as I’d never cried before — for my mother and father and me, and all that we’d been and might have been, and all that had been lost.
I slept through until early morning, waking from a vivid dream. (Nearly all of my dreams since have been vivid, and I remember every one of them. Is it like that for you?) In my dream were horses, and bees, and a woman’s voice, singing: When evening falls beyond the blue, the shadows know I wait for you.
The song still in my head, I got up and went to the bathroom — and discovered that, while I’d slept, my body had “entered the sacred realm of Womanhood.” I cleaned myself up and went down to tell Mrs. McG., who blushed. She in turn must have said something to my father, I thought later, because that afternoon he seemed more distant and distracted than he’d ever been with me before. His eyes were wary when he looked at me.
We were working on geometric proofs (a subject I secretly adored), and I was engrossed in proving that the opposite sides of a quadrilateral inscribed in a cyclic quadrilateral are supplementary. When I looked up, my father was staring at me.
“Father?” I said.
“You were humming,” he said.
The shock in his voice struck me as almost comical. “Is that so wrong?” I asked.
“The song,” he said. “Where did you learn it?”
It was still playing, in my head: Where water flows beyond the blue, along the shore I wait for you.
“I dreamed it, last night,” I said. “I even dreamed lyrics.”
He nodded, still visibly upset. “It was one of her favorites,” he said finally.
“My mother’s?” But I didn’t need to ask. I thought, Why can’t you say that, Father? Say it was my mother’s favorite song?
He looked as crushed as if I’d spoken the words, not merely thought them.
Later that afternoon we took our usual break for yoga and meditation. I went through the yoga poses without even thinking about them, but when we got to the meditation part, all I could do was think.
My father had taught me a meditation mantra: “Who am I? I don’t know.” I repeated the phrase again and again, and normally it led me to a place where I had no consciousness of self, where my mind became empty and open, and I felt at peace. But today, the mantra in my head abbreviated itself and sounded angry: “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”
One Saturday afternoon in late summer, Kathleen sprawled across an oversized towel spread across a patch of our back lawn. I sat in the shade of the horse chestnut tree, breathing in the scent of dandelions baking in the sun. Cicadas sang, and although the sun was hot, the breeze carried a faint tang of winter. We both wore bathing suits and sunglasses. Kathleen’s skin glistened with baby oil, while mine was coated in sunscreen.
“Michael will have his license in October,” she said. “Dad is going to let him have the Chevy on weekends, provided he doesn’t stay out late. So he can drive us around.”
“We should buy him a uniform,” I said lazily.
Kathleen looked momentarily puzzled. Then she grinned, “Our personal chauffeur,” she said. “Picture that.”
“We’ll sit in the backseat.” I pulled back my hair, which had grown past my shoulders that summer, and coiled it against my nape.
“What’s that smell?” Kathleen sat up suddenly.
A faint, familiar odor of something burning grew stronger as I sniffed.
Kathleen got to her feet. She walked toward the house, pausing a few times to breathe again. I followed.
The smell emanated from the basement. An opaque casement window had been propped open, and Kathleen went right to it. She knelt to peer inside.
I felt an instinct to warn her, but I said nothing. Silently I knelt beside her.
We were looking into the room I called the night kitchen. Mary Ellis Root stood at a wooden table, chopping meat. Behind her a stew pot had been placed over high heat on the gas stove, and she flung chunks of meat into it with one hand, over her shoulder. She never missed once.
I put a hand on Kathleen’s shoulder to draw her back before we were seen. We retreated to the chestnut tree. “Who is that witch, and what was she making?” Kathleen said.
I explained that Root was my father’s housekeeper. “He has a special diet,” I said, thinking, which I always assumed was vegetarian, like mine.
“It looked as disgusting as it smells,” Kathleen said. “It looked like liver or hearts.”
Later, we went back to my room to change clothes. Kathleen picked up the disposable camera from my dresser and snapped a photo of me while I was putting my shirt on. I grabbed the camera from her.
“No fair,” I said.
She grabbed it back from me, laughed, and ran out into the corridor with it. I finished buttoning my shirt before I followed her.
But the long cedar-paneled corridor yawned at me, empty. I began to open bedroom doors, sure that she was hiding.
The house, so familiar, such a given, suddenly seemed strange to me. I was seeing it through Kathleen’s eyes. The worn carpets and Victorian furniture suited the house, and I knew somehow that my mother had chosen them.
Here was the room my parents once shared; they had lain on that four-poster bed. I didn’t dwell long on the thought. I focused on the wallpaper — the sprigs of lavender, patterned against an ivory background, that alternated from clusters of six blossoms to those of two with monotonous regularity from ceiling to floor — and on the place near the baseboard where a strip of paper curled away, revealing an olive-colored pattern beneath it. I wondered how many layers of paper I would need to peel away before I found a pattern that pleased me.
Room after room was empty. I even checked the closets. I’d entered the last bedroom when I sensed movement behind me, and when I spun around, Kathleen snapped my picture.
“Gotcha,” she said. “Why do you look so scared?”
“I don’t know,” I said. But I did know. I’d been frightened that something — what, I didn’t know — might have happened to her.
“Let’s ride over to the drugstore and get this developed,” she said, waving the camera.
“But we haven’t used all the film yet.”
“Yes, we have.” She grinned. “While you were wasting time up here, I took some shots downstairs. Including one of hunky dad that I plan to hang on my wall.”
“Really.” I hoped that she was joking.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I didn’t disturb him. He was so deep into his reading that he never even saw me.”
On the way downstairs, Kathleen paused to examine a painting on the wall. “Creepy,” she said.
It was a still life of a tulip, an hourglass, and a skull — so familiar to me that I rarely noticed it. “It’s called Memento Mori,” I said. “It means: Remember that you’re mortal.”