“Oh, you know how people chat in a small town. We haven’t anything better to do-especially this time of the year, when the days are short as a pepper plant.” She looks out the large picture window and continues, her voice a little dreamy. “Soon the geese will be coming back. We’ll see them flying north in just a few weeks. I love geese. Big, powerful birds. They’re another sign of spring.” Then she turns back to you and makes eye contact. “Tell me: Would you and Emily and your beautiful twins like to come to my house for dinner this weekend? Perhaps a casual dinner on Sunday night? Something easy and light?”
This is an enormous amount of information to try to make sense of: There is, as Emily would say, text and subtext. No one can use the words goose and geese around you without knowing that they connote profoundly disturbing images. They do not provoke a PTSD sort of flashback-you do not find yourself sweating when you hear them, they do not induce heart palpitations-but they do conjure for you the destruction of your airplane and the deaths of thirty-nine people. Thirty-six adults, three children. Including one with a doll dressed as a cheerleader. That, too, wound up floating in Lake Champlain, the eyes open, the hair the color of corn silk fanning out like seaweed in the waves. And then there was the girl with the Dora the Explorer backpack. All of the children were, you would learn later, younger than Hallie and Garnet.
At the same time, there is that dinner invitation, proffered out of the blue. An unexpected kindness.
You are not at all sure what to make of the juxtaposition. Was the invitation a spontaneous gesture provoked by guilt? Had she brought up the birds without thinking and then, after realizing what she had done, hoped to make amends with dinner?
“Well, that’s very sweet of you,” you hear yourself murmuring. “Thank you. Let me check with Emily and get back to you.”
“It will be very casual. Maybe some others will come.”
“I’m free!” says Holly from behind her desk, though she doesn’t look up when you glance back at her. “I want to come!”
“Of course,” says Reseda.
You find yourself struck by the names of all of these women around you. Reseda. Holly. Anise. You decide that either you have stumbled upon a secret society of florists or gardeners or all of their parents were hippies. Or, perhaps, they’re part of a coven. You are bemused by that notion in particular and conclude the synaptic link was triggered by the mention, a few minutes ago, of Salem. You always think of witches when you hear the name of that small city. Everyone does. The burning times. The hangings. The women (and men) pressed to death by stones.
“You’re grinning,” says Reseda.
“I just had a funny thought.”
“Can you share it?”
“I like your name. I like all of your names here.”
“The reseda is among the most enticing and fragrant flowers in the world,” she says, and you realize that you’re not in the slightest bit surprised.
When you leave a few minutes later, you have in one hand Gerard’s phone number and in the other a thick espresso-chip cookie from a batch that Anise had baked that very morning and dropped off at the real estate agency. You doubt you will ever call Gerard, at least about that door. But you are glad that you have the cookie. It’s delicious. You hadn’t realized how hungry you were.
Chapter Five
A bird became trapped in the woodstove. It flew in through the top of the chimney just as the late winter sun was starting to thaw the thin skins of ice on the shallow puddles in the driveway. No one was awake in the house. The animal worked its way lower and lower in the Metalbestos prefabricated chimney-a sparkling, cylindrical metal tube that was nine inches wide-from the opening nearly four feet above the twelve-by-twelve pitch made of slate and through the tube that cut through the attic and the second floor, darting finally through the rectangular vent to the catalytic converter and then into the soapstone stove with its regal glass windows. The windows were caked over with soot from fires long ago as well as from the few logs the Lintons had burned, and so the bird flew around and around in the near total dark, its wings frequently clipping the iron walls or the black stains on the glass. Desdemona, the Lintons’ cat, was aware of the animal before anyone else, and she stared alertly at the stove, her haunches raised ever so slightly and her tail occasionally brushing the floor.
Emily was the first one downstairs that morning, and when she saw the cat watching the stove as if it were a mole hole in the yard back in Pennsylvania, she didn’t know what to think. But she switched on the lamp beside the couch and two heavy boxes of unpacked books, and instantly the poor bird made another effort to escape, thwapping into the door because the flue was open just enough to create thin slats of light. Emily knew instantly then what was so interesting to Desdemona. She screamed upstairs to Chip because she was afraid of birds and knew that, once she opened the woodstove door and the bird flew out into the room, she would be utterly useless. And yet it was only when she heard him on the stairs, asking her what was wrong, that she knew how strange and inconsiderate it would be to tell him her panic had been caused by a bird. One small bird. But with the competence that formerly she had taken for granted, he opened the window nearest the stove and closed the door between the living room and the dining room-the room with, perhaps, the strangest, darkest wallpaper, a series of sunflowers that grew from the hardwood floor to the height of a grown man and, over time, had become brown with age and made her think of the elongated, damned souls in an El Greco painting-and used a bath towel to whisk the bird in the direction of the open window. It was a chickadee. She noticed a little black soot on its gray wings and the white of its nape. Instead of flying through the open half of the window, however, the bird darted straight into the solid pane above it, breaking its neck and falling dead onto the carpet.
As Chip gently picked it up, using his fingers to sweep it into the palm of his hand before Desdemona could cart it away in her mouth, Emily started to cry. She thought on some level it was just because it was so small, so very small, but she knew in her heart that there was more to it than that. Much more. Chip brought the bird outside, though where she didn’t know, and then he came back inside and sat down beside her. He put his arm around her. He didn’t say a word, he just rocked her a little bit and sighed, and she let her tears fall against the plaid top of his pajamas until they both heard their girls on the stairs. Abruptly they stood, and she told the children that she had been crying because the bird in the woodstove was just so little, but she was fine now. She was, she really was. They were all just fine.
Y ou stand in blue jeans and a gray sweatshirt with the logo of your old airline emblazoned across the front and shovel coal for nearly thirty minutes, moving the pile a solid five feet from that basement door. It was possible to stand amidst the coal earlier this month when you were merely tinkering with one of the carriage bolts. But if you’re going to get medieval on that door with an ax this morning, you need a little more space. A little more room. Before you know it, you’re sweating, even though it is the first week in March and you are working in a dank basement in a badly insulated house that’s nearly a century and a quarter old. But the furnace emits a little heat, even here, and it’s no more than a dozen feet away.
When you have finally redistributed the coal, you sit on the basement steps to rest and sip from the plastic bottle of soda that has grown warm. Your heart is thumping from the exertion as you study the door and the bolts and wonder what precisely you will find behind it. You didn’t tell Emily you were going to do this when she left for work this morning, you didn’t mention it to the girls before school. You weren’t sure this really was a part of your agenda. You had expected you would tape the doorframes and windowsills and paint another wall in the kitchen. Roll that soothing sienna Emily picked out over the freshly spackled Sheetrock.
You find it interesting that the ax you are going to use to bring down this door came with the house. It’s the one Emily found hidden behind the ancient cleaning supplies in the cabinet underneath the kitchen sink. You could have used the ax you had brought with you along with a litany of other gardening tools from Pennsylvania: the rake and the hoe and the shears and the wheelbarrow. The clippers. The netting for the blueberry bushes. After all, you wandered out to the barn to retrieve the shovel you’re using now and you could have carried the ax back inside the house, too. But instead you pulled down the trapdoor and climbed up into the attic and found the box where Emily had stored those three, strange implements of self-defense: The crowbar. The knife. The ax. For reasons neither of you could precisely articulate, you couldn’t bring yourselves to cart those old items to the dump.
