A Sudden Light: A Novel (7 page)

“Where’s Serena?”

“I don’t know. She must be sleeping.”

“She usually makes my medicine.”

I closed the refrigerator door, and the room returned to darkness. I turned on the lights, revealing Grandpa Samuel, who sat at the table wearing pale sleepy-blue old-fashioned pajamas, with long sleeves and buttons up the front. He reached across and rubbed the stumps of his missing fingers, which was something I noticed that he did a lot, a nervous tic. When he was stressed, he massaged his stumps. I wondered if he felt his fingers still. Phantom digits.

“You don’t know how to make it yourself?” I asked.

“Serena makes my medicine.”

“What kind of medicine?”

“Sleeping medicine. She makes it for me when I can’t sleep. Will you make it for me?”

“Where is it?”

“She keeps it in the cupboard, there,” he said, indicating with his hand. “There’s a bottle of medicine in there. She puts some milk in it so it doesn’t taste bad.”

I opened the indicated cupboard door, but there was no medicine that I could see.

“What does it look like?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t see her do it. It’s in a bottle with a white label.”

I saw only one bottle in the cupboard: the whiskey Serena and my father were drinking earlier. But it did have a white label.

“This?” I asked, pulling out the bottle of Jim Beam.

“Yes, that’s it.”

“It’s whiskey.”

“It’s medicine,” he said. “It helps me sleep.”

“I’ll bet,” I said. I wasn’t sure if it was clever or cruel of Serena to give Grandpa Samuel whiskey to get him to fall asleep. Either way, to misrepresent the booze as medicine was dubious. Still, I felt I had to abide by the customs of Riddell House, so I set the bottle on the counter and retrieved a glass from a second cupboard.

“Mix one part medicine with two parts milk,” Grandpa Samuel instructed. “That’s what Serena does. Sometimes she warms it up for me, but I don’t need it warm.”

“I’ll make it cold, then,” I said. “I don’t know how to light the burner.”

I mixed the drink as instructed and set the glass down before him. Then I poured myself some lemonade and sat across the table. I wanted to ask Grandpa Samuel about the ghost. I wanted to ask him about his fingers. So many questions. But we were doing the Zen thing, so I held off.

“Can you hear her dancing?” Grandpa Samuel finally asked, breaking the trance.

“Who?”

“Isobel. Can you hear her? Serena says she can’t hear her, but I think she can. Her steps are very soft because she was such a good dancer.”

“Isobel was?”

“When I met her, she was going to dance in the ballet. Not the kind with pink skirts, but
modern
dancing. Oh, she was beautiful, and when she danced, everyone sat up. No one could take their eyes off her. I told her I had a ballroom in my house and asked her if she wanted to see it and she laughed. She had a very long neck and a perfectly shaped face, and when she smiled, her whole face laughed. She said that was the best pickup line she’d ever heard, but then I showed it to her.”

“A ballroom?”

“On the third floor. You don’t believe me?”

“I haven’t been up there.”

“I brought her home and showed her the ballroom and she danced for me. I played records on a portable phonograph I had. I wanted to get a console, but my father refused to allow it, so I got the portable Crosley instead. I had jazz records I played for her, and she danced.”

He drifted into reminiscence, but I wanted to hear more.

“What did she dance to?” I asked.

“She kissed me. Oh, Isobel. You kissed me and I told you I would do anything for you, but I couldn’t do it. In the end, I couldn’t do what you wanted.”

He looked so sad and lost as he sipped his medicine. But I didn’t want him to stop talking; I was thirsty for clues about my past and about my father.

“How did she die?” I asked, because my father had never told me. I knew that she died when my father was sixteen, but that’s all I knew.

Grandpa Samuel looked at me through his liquid eyes and said in a hushed whisper: “Listen!”

I listened, and I could hear footsteps, like Grandpa Samuel said, coming from somewhere in the house. I was about to say something, but he hushed me, and then said, “Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can hear music, too.”

I listened carefully. I practically stopped breathing, that’s how quiet I was. And I heard music. Jazz. A saxophone playing.

“I hear it,” I said.

“You do? Serena says she can’t hear it. She says I’m crazy. But do
you
hear it?”

“I do.”

I heard it all. Footsteps. Music playing very softly, far away. It was exhilarating.

“Is it a ghost?” I whispered.

“It’s her,” Grandpa Samuel said. “She comes and dances for me.”

And then the music ended and the footsteps stopped.

“What happened between you and Dad?” I asked Grandpa Samuel.

He looked at me with his milky eyes.

“Can I have some more medicine?” he asked.

“Not until you tell me. Something happened, because he hasn’t been back here for twenty-three years, and he never talks about you or Serena or Isobel. Something happened. What was it?”

“Serena gives me more medicine,” he said.

“Serena isn’t here,” I replied willfully.

“You’re just like him,” he hissed in a harsh whisper, his eyes fixed on me.
“Spiteful.”

I stared at my grandfather for a moment, feeling stung by his words. I had no animosity toward him, and I wasn’t sure why he would speak to me so harshly. But then I remembered Serena’s talk of his dementia. I imagined a brain looking like a wet sponge.

“That’s okay, then,” I said, standing. I picked up the bottle of whiskey and uncapped it.

“One part medicine—”

“Two parts milk. I’ve got it.”

I gave Grandpa Samuel the drink, then I put away the milk and the whiskey.

“Do you want me to leave the light on?”

“Turn it off,” Grandpa Samuel said, so I did.

“It’s my house,” he said from the shadows at the dark end of the table. “You can’t have it.”

I was struck by the definitiveness of his declaration.

“I don’t want it,” I said.

“I can stay as long as I want, and you can’t make me leave.”

I didn’t understand my grandfather’s last remark, and worked to puzzle it out as I climbed the stairs to my room. When I got to the landing on the second floor, I heard a ticking sound coming from the third floor. I cautiously continued up to the landing; the air was humid and smelled of must. A long hallway, decorated with ornate wood panels and burgundy floral wallpaper, disappeared into the shadowy darkness; to my left was a small reception area with double doors opposite. The ballroom. I stood very still and listened: the house moaned, as I’d already grown to recognize, and I heard ticking from behind the doors. I crossed the reception area and into the dark vestibule both nervous and excited by what I might find. I opened one of the ballroom doors and peeked inside: it was a long low room with a bare wooden floor and a stage on the far side. A chandelier hung from the ceiling, and light sconces adorned the walls, but all the lights were dark. In the moonlight, I could see the cobwebs gathered on the fixtures, as well as in the corners of the room,
and I could see a coating of dust on everything. I could also see footsteps in the dust on the dance floor. I glanced around in search of the ticking. On the floor next to the stage was an old portable record player in a leather, hard-sided case: the phonograph Grandpa Samuel had told me about. I crossed over to it and saw the cause of the ticking: the turntable was running; a record spun on the platter, though it had finished playing, so the needle ticked against the paper label.

I switched it off, and I sensed a stirring in the room behind me. As I turned around, I noticed someone else was in the ballroom, and I felt a tingling in my spine. It must have been my father or Serena, I thought, because I’d left Grandpa in the kitchen.

“Hello?” I asked as I took a couple of tentative steps forward. But the figure did not reply. “I see you,” I said, and a pang of fear cut through me, because if it were my father or Serena, they would have said something. I took a couple more steps, and I could see the person shift slightly in the shadows.

“This isn’t funny,” I said, my voice unsteady. “I’m turning on the lights.”

I bolted across the dance floor and hit the switches by the doors; the lights sprang to life, but when I turned around, the room was empty.

Whoever it was—and I
knew
someone had been there—had vanished. I was alone in the ballroom, and I was afraid.

I
woke up late the next morning. After my encounter with the dancing figure in the ballroom, I wasn’t able to fall asleep until light started sneaking into my room. I couldn’t get the visions out of my head of record players playing on their own, footsteps at night, a spirit in a secret stairway who is revealed by striking a match. The voice I thought I’d heard say my name. Something weird was going on. And since we clearly weren’t going to abandon Riddell House based on my experiences, I had to get to the bottom of it.

I went downstairs in search of my father. In the kitchen, I found a note from Serena encouraging me, once again, to make myself at home, though I didn’t feel I would ever, really, feel at home in Riddell House. I didn’t even know what time it was, since I had misplaced my watch somewhere between chasing a dancing ghost and waking up in the morning, and there was no clock in the kitchen. I skipped breakfast and went outside.

My father wasn’t in the meadow, so I ventured into the courtyard behind the house. The front of Riddell House faced westward to Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains, and had a majestic, sweeping facade; the rear of Riddell House was something different: a formal garden, which must have been impressive at one time, had deteriorated into something better suited to a haunted house. Broken stone paths were overgrown with clover. An impressive fountain, cleaved from a great slab of marble and standing taller than me, was stained with rust and appeared to have been a dedicated rainwater collector for decades. The box ferns were shaggy and overgrown, the flower beds were covered with moss and sword ferns, and the roses had grown so long and leggy they couldn’t keep themselves up but tipped their heads over to rest on the hard ground.

Behind the garden, down a path of pebbles and weeds, was a crumbling swimming pool; a foot of black and green sludge percolated in the deep end like tar. The tile walls, which surely were once beautifully patterned, were cracked and broken. The pool house had been long abandoned, and the door yawned open to the darkness inside. To the east of the pool was a patio with fluted urns sitting upon a sturdy balustrade that opened to a broad staircase stepping down to a clay tennis court with no net and broken standards and a cracked and brittle surface.

My father was still nowhere to be seen.

I circled around again to the meadow and spotted him out by the bluff. He glanced back at me when he heard my approaching footsteps, but other than that, he didn’t move, standing on the edge of the cliff looking down.

It was dramatic on the precipice. The drop was almost two hundred feet. The beach below was rocky and full of driftwood, entire trees bleached by the salt and the sun. At the base of the cliff were two sets of railroad tracks on a rocky berm that snaked off along the shoreline both north and south, bending as the landform undulated against the water.

“Elijah Riddell built those tracks,” my father said as I approached.

“I thought he was timber money,” I said, already feeling the sway of vertigo. It wasn’t that I didn’t like heights, it was that I didn’t like falling from those heights and dying.

“Timber and railroad companies were intertwined. It was a very insider world. You must have learned about Teddy Roosevelt and trust-busting and all that in American history. The government gave land grants to the railroads, the railroads made deals with the timber barons to harvest the trees, the timber barons sold off mining rights to the precious metal concerns—”

“Precious metals?” I asked. “Here?”

“Broaden your scope. The Northwest used to be considered anything west of Chicago. They found a lot of silver in the panhandle of Idaho. Sapphires in Montana. But the big money was in copper.”

“Why not gold?”

“The telegraph. Suddenly everyone needed copper wire. And it’s horrible stuff to mine. It abuses the body.”

“Ah,” I said, impressed by my father’s knowledge of the arcane.

“Anyway, Elijah was in all of it. He had a piece of everything. Your great-great-grandfather supplied all those railroad ties down there, every single one of them. Have you heard the horns from the trains when they pass?”

“No.”

“Now that I’ve pointed it out, you will. When the trains pass, they always blast their horns in salute to Elijah Riddell.”

“Really? He died a long time ago.”

“That’s the thing about tradition,” he said. “People don’t really need to know how it got there; they do it anyway.”

“Sounds like religion.”

We paused for a moment, and I didn’t break the spell. For my entire life, I’d wanted to bond with my father; that we were finally doing it on the edge of a cliff seemed somehow foreboding, but it was a step in the right direction.

“I lost my wedding ring,” my father said after a time, feeling the ring
finger on his left hand. “Is that some kind of a sign? The crumbling of my marriage?”

“Did you look under your dresser?” I asked.

“I looked everywhere. It’s gone.”

I thought for a moment. My watch was missing. Could they be connected?

“Grandpa Samuel hears Isobel dancing at night. In the ballroom.”

My father responded only by nodding his head.

“She’s dead,” I added. “She can’t really dance.”

“Grandpa Samuel hears things,” my father said. “It’s part of his dementia.”

“Sure,” I agreed. “But . . . I heard it, too. And I don’t have dementia.”

“When did you hear it?”