A Sudden Light: A Novel (40 page)

“I don’t understand—”

“I think you
do
understand, Trevor, for you seem to have understood
everything to this point. You’ve seen the signs; you’ve read the clues. And yet you struggle.”

“Maybe I don’t have the life experience to understand,” I said.

Ben laughed, put his arm around my shoulder, and led me away from the fountain.

“You’re fond of owning the narrative, aren’t you?” he said. “An interesting personality trait. You like to think of yourself as an observer, but you crave to be in the thick of it, don’t you?”

“How did you do it, then? Appear like this and have the others in the house appear? And if you can just do something like that, why didn’t you do it sooner?”

“Would you have believed it sooner? No. You would have run and hidden under your bed. Perhaps you’d have gone mad. Perhaps you would have medicated yourself into a stupor. You would have fallen into line with convention: madmen and substance abusers see what you are seeing; ‘normal’ people do not. Isn’t that right?”

“I guess,” I replied with a shrug as we continued walking down the path.

“You guess?”

“I know. Yes. I know.”

“So, then. I had to wait until you were ready.”

I stopped and looked at Ben.

“I gave away your house,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“I put you in a difficult situation,” he said, “as I did with my father, long ago. It was unfair of me to put him in that position. He was double-bound, feeling an obligation to me and to my brother, equally. And to my brother’s heirs, as well. My father did what he thought was best. To satisfy his conflicting promises, he devised a plan, the history of which you know.”

“Serena told me.”

“She’s told you things that are true, as well as things that are not true,” he said. “My father was very generous with Abraham; Abraham
was neither appreciative nor sound with his inheritance. Yes, Elijah donated much of his fortune, but he did not abandon his heirs, as Serena would have you believe. But why hear it from me, when you can know it for yourself?”

He handed me a letter, which I turned over in my hands. It was addressed:
To My Future Heir.
I began to open it, but he stopped me.

“Not now,” he said.

I respected his request, so I folded the letter and slipped it into my pocket.

“I thought you were the one,” Ben said as we walked further up the path. “Perhaps you’re not. Either way. I will see this through.”

“I don’t understand. Do you choose to stay here, or are you stuck here?”

“Good question,” he replied with a laugh. “Perhaps I have chosen to be stuck here. Because we all choose our fate, whether or not we admit it. Do you see?”

“I think so.”

“It’s not so much how we act, but how we judge ourselves for our actions. I am responsible for Harry’s death—”

“But it was an accident. At least what I saw.”

“But not what
I
saw,” he said. “I saw it differently. And until I can absolve myself, I can’t move on—I
will not
move on. When this area has returned to the wild forest, it will be the symbol that I have done so.”

“And then you and Harry can come back to visit together?”

Ben glanced quickly at me and smiled again, but this time it was with sadness at the corners of his eyes.

“You’ve been reading his journals,” he said. “You know him well. Would that one day you feel the love for someone that I still feel for Harry, and will feel for eternity.”

“I got Grandpa Samuel to sign his name on a piece of paper,” I said, “and because of that, you’ll be stuck here for hundreds of years. I’m so stupid. It’ll be the end of the world before this place is a forest again.”

“Harry will wait for me. He understands. He knew intuitively that climbing a tree—and he and I climbed some of the tallest trees that ever existed, taller than trees are allowed to grow anymore—climbing a tree isn’t about getting somewhere; it’s about
being
somewhere. And if we’re comfortable with that notion, then I suppose we have all the time in the world, don’t we?”

We continued walking up the hill.

“Maybe it’s not too late,” I said hopefully. “Maybe I can still do it. I can still release you.”

“Can you?”

“I think so. But if I make it work, I’ll need a quid pro quo.”

Ben laughed outright. “What is your quid pro quo, my great-grand-nephew?”

“I want the truth,” I said firmly, though a bit unsteadily, because sometimes the idea of truth frightened me. “I want
all
of the truth. You’ve shown me so many things; I know you can do it. My father came back here to see Isobel. Will he ever see her? Why does he want to see her so badly? And why did Grandpa Samuel send him away?”

Ben sighed. He spoke to himself and ticked off something on his fingers. Maybe my information requests? I don’t know. But soon, he faced me.

“I believed Samuel would be the one,” he said. “He turned away from me. Then I believed it would be your father, but he loved his mother too much to see anything else. Then I believed it would be you. But you listened to Serena. You believed her. And she manipulated you. You know that, don’t you?”

I did feel manipulated; I nodded.

“Money won’t solve your problems, Trevor. You will be disappointed if you expect it to.”

“You sound like my mother.”

He laughed.

“Your mother understands certain things, but she doesn’t
understand everything. She doesn’t understand what you and I understand, does she? That takes a certain amount of belief.”

“How can I make her believe?”

“There’s no answer to that question,” he replied. “At least to nonbelievers. Belief has to come from within, not from without. If it’s forced upon you by tradition, it never really means anything.”

“So how does a person believe?” I asked.

“By seeing the beauty in everything. By seeing the potential in every moment. God created all things, Trevor. God loves all things. When you love all things as well, you will find your happiness.”

I thought about his words as we walked further into the night, the gravel crunching under our footsteps as the clouds bounced off the moon.

“I found this place when I was scouting yards to harvest,” he said. “It was unbearably beautiful, really. To stand on the bluff here, with nothing but the forest behind me, and the sound before me, and the mountains. When the sun was right, it was a shock to the senses. We were going to clear-cut the entire area, because it was the most efficient method. But my father had spoken of having an estate, and when I saw this place, I told him I would build him an estate here that would put his society friends to shame. However, I would do it only if he spared these trees. And I would do it under one condition: I required full control of all aspects of the estate. He agreed, because he wanted me near him so I would be close to Alice. Early on, I brought Harry up from the coast to be with me, and to help me manage the construction as well. The two of us rode our horses along the road through the city of Fremont and up through Phinney’s place and past his zoo, and we came to the point over there. Much of the area had already been cut, but not The North Estate.

“We stopped our horses on the ridge, just where it crests when you enter the property. We surveyed the acreage from afar, and we admired the land for such a long time. I looked over at Harry, and saw tears in his eyes.

“ ‘I’ve never seen a place so special,’ he said.

“ ‘It’s for you, Harry,’ I told him. ‘It’s for you and me. This is a place we will always have.’

“ ‘Promise me we will have it forever,’ he said.”

Benjamin stopped speaking, and we continued walking along the path for a time.

“Did you promise him?” I asked, wanting him to continue the story.

“I did,” Ben said. “I promised him that this would be our place for eternity, and I would not rest until it were so. I promised him it would forever be the jewel he and I first saw together. So we built a house for my father that I knew would crumble with time. The house itself would feed the forest around it. And somehow—I’m not even sure I knew how—I felt my love for Harry would always be here.”

We stopped walking, and I realized he had led me all the way to the top of Observatory Hill.

“I believe they’ve all gone home,” Ben said, gesturing down the hill toward the house. “You can go back to bed now, if you like.”

He had led me to his grave; we were standing at his tombstone.

“I want the truth about my father,” I blurted out, afraid Ben might vanish.

“It’s not for me to give,” he said. “It’s for your father to give.”

“But he won’t tell me. Why won’t he tell me?”

“Some things are so painful, they tear a person’s soul. It’s too difficult to see.”

“The tear is difficult to see?”

“No. The act of tearing is difficult to see. It’s difficult to watch a soul being torn.”

“I can handle it,” I said with great resolve. “Show me what happened to my father. And then I’ll deliver you the house so you can fulfill your promise to Harry.”

Ben sighed with half a laugh.

“So we have a deal?” I pushed.

“I’ll give you what you ask, because I can.”

“And I’ll return your land to the forest.”

“I don’t require a quid pro quo,” Ben said. “Serena needs such things; I don’t. You’ve allowed me to feel things I haven’t felt in a very long time. The earth and the breeze and the smell of blossoms. I shield my eyes from the glow of the sun.”

“I did that?”

“You won’t see me anymore, Trevor. Nor will you hear from me. I’ll give you what you have asked, and then I’ll leave you alone to make your way in Riddell House. It’s time for you to make your own decisions.”

He held his hand to his brow as if to shade his eyes. I looked in the direction he looked and saw a bright star in the sky. When I turned back, Ben was gone.

I ran down the hill to the garden. The fountain was no longer running, though water dripped from its basin, as if it had recently been filled. I hurried around the rear of the house and fiddled with the fuse box; nothing seemed out of order. Still, the house was dark. Maybe it was a power outage after all. I went into the kitchen, which was empty of people, though, oddly, not empty of dirty plates. What a strange haunting, I thought. Almost as if Ben wasn’t very good at the whole ghost thing. He could conjure the scene, but then he forgot to put everything away. I made my way down the dark hallway, which was silent except for the ticking of the grandfather clock, which echoed throughout the first floor. And, as in the kitchen, the rooms were devoid of people, but not of their detritus: snifters and cups and saucers, and even a lit cigar, which uncoiled a thin stream of smoke into the parlor. When I reached the foyer, I thought it odd that the clock was ticking: it hadn’t run at all since I’d been there, and in its stoic silence somehow gave me the impression that it hadn’t worked in years.

I heard mumbling coming from the study and looked inside. Two men occupied the room, one sitting and one standing. The sitting man was Elijah, I could tell by his hair. And the standing man—the man in the tuxedo from the kitchen—must have been Mr. Thomas.

“Master Ben’s body has been laid out in the parlor, sir,” Mr. Thomas said. “As you have requested.”

“Stop the clock, Mr. Thomas. Remove the pendulum. It is important to mark the moment of my son’s death, so others will know.”

Mr. Thomas left the room and passed directly in front of me without taking notice. He proceeded down the hall, opened the door to the grandfather clock, stopped the pendulum from swinging, and lifted the weight from its hook. I approached the clock; the hands said six-fifteen.

“I’ll try, Ben,” I said out loud. “I don’t know if I can do it, but I’ll try.”

Mr. Thomas closed the door to the grandfather clock and returned to the study to attend to Elijah.

“It is all we can hope for,” he said as he passed me, and I wasn’t sure if he had spoken those words in response to me or to Elijah. Or if Mr. Thomas had even spoken the words at all.

*  *  *

When I awoke from my dream in the middle of the night—or from Ben’s haunting, I should say—I found a letter in my hand. The letter he had handed me. It was real.

I opened the yellowed envelope and removed the sheaf of paper that was inside. The handwriting was a neat, looping cursive. At the top of the page, the embossed name Elijah Riddell had been crossed out with a pen swipe. The date was March 5, 1916.

To My Future Heir,

If you are reading this letter, you are alive, and I congratulate you on your achievement. If you are reading this letter, your father—my son, Abraham Riddell—is dead, and for that, I express my deepest regret. Though Abraham and I didn’t see eye to eye very often, I did care for him in my own way.

I also cared for my first son, Benjamin. It is because of a promise I made to him that I am writing to you now. The attorneys who have
presented you with this letter will describe to you the details. My objective in leaving this letter for you is to express the
sentiment
properly.

When he was alive, I promised Benjamin that, when Riddell House was no longer useful, it would be returned to untamed and wild nature forever. It was to be his legacy. It was to be
my
legacy as well, I suppose. A small jewel preserved, which could one day be held up against the mountain of jewels I have destroyed in the name of progress. No matter the justification, a promise is a promise and I vowed to uphold it, while also providing for the rest of my family.

Abraham, your father, became fixated on developing The North Estate. I don’t know why he held on to the idea so tightly, but he would not unclench his jaws. He threatened me. He cajoled me. He cursed me. He cited my refusal as proof that my love for him was not as pure as it was for Benjamin. His claim was not untrue—Abraham has always been a fool and a laggard and a squanderer of fortunes—but that is not why I have held fast to my promise.

When I was a younger man, I would have dismissed my obligation to the deceased, even if he were my son. “What good is a promise to a dead man?” I would have protested. I would have been happy to bequeath this property to my living son upon my death, as is custom. But something very special has happened in recent weeks that has changed my mind entirely. Benjamin, my deceased son, has returned to me.