A Sudden Light: A Novel (17 page)

Wednesday, September 21, 1904

They are all gone. Thomas and I are alone now, and the house shudders with emptiness.

I closed the book and listened. Serena and my father were calling for me, but I was safe from them inside Elijah’s sanctuary. I didn’t know what time it was, because I still hadn’t found my watch.

I returned the diary to the box, closed the closet door, and descended
the stairs quickly but carefully, unlatched the door and closed it behind myself. I didn’t want to be discovered, so I didn’t turn on my flashlight but went down the spiral stairs in the dark instead. I slipped out of the false linen closet and into the hall.

Just when I thought I was clear, Serena called out from behind me.

“Where have you been?”

“Around,” I said, trying to act calm.

“Why are you in the south wing?” she asked. “No one uses the south wing. Are you looking for something?”

“I was just . . . interested. I was looking around. That’s all.”

She scrutinized me for a moment.

“I came home early so we could all go to dinner on the waterfront,” she said finally. “Fresh cracked crab. Are you ready?”

It was dinnertime already? I’d spent the whole day in the secret room? I realized how hungry I was.

“I should put on a nicer shirt,” I said, since I was wearing only a T-shirt.

“If you like. But then you’ll be Seattle Formal. If you’re wearing pants that go down to your ankles, shoes that cover your toes, and a shirt that covers your forearms, you’re in formal attire in Seattle.”

I laughed with relief; Serena suspected nothing.

“I’ll just wash my hands.”

“Do hurry,” she said. “It gets crowded downtown on a day like today, and I don’t like Grandpa going to bed late.”

“I’ll hurry, Simply Serena.”

“Like the wind, Clever Trevor. Like the wind.”

W
e returned to Riddell House after dinner, and the sky was still light with the evening sun. Our small group dispersed, and I decided to make the hike up Observatory Hill, a place I was determined to visit. I wanted to see the graves. When I reached the top, panting from the hike, I found a small patch of weeds in an enclosure formed by a low, dilapidated picket fence. Within the enclosure were five tombstones. I stepped over the fence and into the mini-graveyard to examine the stones. Harry Lindsey, Benjamin Riddell, Elijah Riddell, Abraham Riddell, Isobel Jones Riddell. The dates on Harry Lindsey’s tombstone were January 2, 1883–September 10, 1904. The dates on Benjamin’s tombstone were May 12, 1876–September 11, 1904.

The epitaph on Benjamin’s tombstone was difficult to read, as the limestone had been eroded by the wind and rain, but I brushed the lichens from the stone with my thumb and blew away the dust so I could see.

MY PEACE I GIVE UNTO YOU—JOHN MUIR

From
The Mountains of California
. And from the card that Ben had written to Elijah after he died.

I returned to my room and opened the windows, hoping for a breeze. With the lights off, I aimed the fan at my head and lay down on the bed, cradling the carved wooden hand to my chest; I felt a visceral need to hold it close. Ben. Harry. Elijah. They were just shadows from my family’s past, but they were becoming so real to me. And then the images came harder. They came before the dark shade of sleep had been pulled down. Branches whipping against my face, and the breathlessness of falling. I fought against it. I didn’t want Ben’s dream, though Ben fought so hard to give it to me. Lying back and seeing the sky, the clouds, and falling. Endlessly falling, the hollow feeling of my stomach in my mouth, of despair. I struggled. I resisted. I battled. Until I woke up with a start, sweating and shaken. Still, I held the hand.

The room was dark. The house was quiet. I went to the door and opened it tentatively. The hallway was silent. Not a creature stirring. I glanced at the clock. Just after nine. I wandered down the long hall and to my father’s room, which was empty. Down the stairs and back to the kitchen. I found my father sitting at the table, watching television quietly. A baseball game. My father didn’t even like baseball.

He looked up when he heard me enter.

“Oh, hey,” he said. “You feel okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I blinked at him.

“What have you got there?” he asked, noticing the hand, which I still cradled in my arms.

I had forgotten I was holding it. I lifted it and held it out for my father to see. My father beckoned. I approached and set the carving down on the table.

“Where did you find it?”

He didn’t reach out for it; he just stared at it. I grew uncomfortable but said nothing.

“Where did you find it?” he asked again.

“In the barn,” I said. “There are a bunch of footlockers in the loft. I found it in one of them.”

“What else was in the footlocker?”

“Clothes and stuff. Old school papers.”

“
My
old school papers?” he asked, but he clearly already knew the answer. Still, he did not take his eyes off the hand, as if he were afraid it might vanish if he stopped looking at it.

“Yes.”

A balloon of silence expanded in the room. It started small, and with every breath it got bigger and bigger until the silence practically squeezed my father and me against the walls with its explosive potential.

“Do you know what my father said to me after my mother died?” he asked eventually, and the air eased out of the balloon so gently. “He came into my room, handed me a suitcase, and he said, ‘They’re coming for you in the morning; you can take one bag.’ ”

He looked up at me for the first time since the wooden hand had been set on the table.

“I’ve wondered what happened to the things that didn’t fit into that suitcase,” he said.

“They’re in a locker in the barn.”

“Why are you looking for things?”

“Because I’m a truth seeker,” I replied.

“A truth seeker,” my father echoed.

He gave me the hand, and then he led me down to the barn through the night air with the crickets creaking and the frogs singing so loudly in the darkness it was almost disturbing. The moon was perfect and there were so many stars.

Grandpa Samuel wasn’t in the barn. My father dug around the long workbench with all the vises and devices attached to it and all the tools hanging above it, everything covered with sawdust and some things more worn and rusted than others. He unearthed a box of small wooden dowels and filled his pocket with a handful of them. He
gathered a hand drill and scavenged a drawer for bits until he found one that matched the diameter of the dowels. He grabbed some coarse sandpaper, a bottle of wood glue, and two wood clamps, and we headed back to the house.

“What are we doing?” I asked, once we were back outside.

“You know, Trevor, sometimes you have to set the universe right.”

“I know. I’ve been trying. It hasn’t been working very well.”

“I guess we both have to try harder.”

Back in the foyer, my father used the rough-grit sandpaper to take the sheen off the top of the newel at the bottom of the main staircase. As soon as I saw him working, it all clicked for me. I
knew
there was something missing. I knew the newel looked truncated in some way, but years of being oiled by hands rubbing against it, and maybe even some cosmetic sanding, concealed the scar. My father got the newel roughed up enough that when he set the carved hand and globe atop, it fit almost perfectly; the wrist appeared to grow from the banister and hold up the earth for all to see. Like Atlas, almost. Like God, maybe.

My father pulled a pencil from the stash of stuff he’d grabbed in the barn, and he made some marks. He used the hand drill to bore holes into the hand and the newel post. When he was done, he used wood glue and clamps to secure the hand to the newel and banister.

“Do you feel it?” he asked, as he admired the restored hand.

“Feel what?” I asked in reply.

“The power. The energy.”

“What does the energy do?”

“Maybe it will bring her back,” he said.

“Bring
who
back?”

“My mother.”

I was right: there was a lot to be resolved by my father before we would be able to move forward with any real future plans to get our family back together. We could develop the land and make money all we wanted, but it wouldn’t solve the real problem that was gnawing at my father.

We remained silent for a moment, and then footsteps approached. Serena entered the foyer.

“What are you two up to?” she asked.

She followed our eyes to the hand.

“Brother Jones! I declare! What have you done?”

“I’ve put it back,” he said.

“But why? It will make Daddy crazy.”

“He’s already crazy.”

“He’s
demented
,” she clarified. “
This
will make him crazy.”

“I don’t care,” my father said, still staring at the hand. “I did it for Mom.”

Serena sidled up behind him and touched his arm lightly. Touch. Until he looked at her.

“Tell me you’re not getting sentimental on me, Brother Jones,” she said. “Tell me this won’t change our plans.”

“I’m setting things right,” he said firmly.

“And when they’re right, you’ll get Daddy to sign the papers, yes?”

“Yes.”

She leaned into him and kissed his cheek.

“I knew you would come to save me,” she said softly. “I never once lost faith.”

She drifted down the hall in her flowing dress with her bare feet not touching the ground, gliding, her nails painted blue, her toes she used to tease me, slipping off her shoes in the kitchen when she sat to rest after a hard afternoon of cooking, sitting and pressing her thumbs into the balls of her feet to release the tension and I would watch her do it and I would see the blue nails and get a hard-on. She did it for too long and she did it too obviously and she took too much pleasure from it, and then she would stop abruptly and hide her feet under the table and say to me, “Run along now and wash up,” so I would go upstairs and lose myself in the images of Serena’s small waist and big boobs and blue toenails, her citrus scent that I could smell as if she were in the room with me. She
was so hot and she was playing with me—but I somehow wanted to be played with. So I didn’t shy away from it at all; I felt the stiffness rising and I resisted the urge to adjust. And I despised myself for my base urges.

“My mother said this hand belongs to the spirit of the house,” my father said after Serena was gone.

“Who took it away?” I asked, refocusing on my father as the citrusy scent dissipated.

“Grandpa Samuel. He took the ax to it.”

“But why?”

“People destroy things they don’t understand,” he said. “Those things make them feel inadequate and insecure. So they destroy. But now it’s back. I’m back. And he can’t hide anymore.”

“Hide what?” I asked. “What’s he hiding from?”

“The truth, Trevor. Do you know what he said to me before he sent me away?”

“ ‘You can take one bag’?”

“Before that,” he said after scrutinizing me for assholery or snideness, of which there was no evidence. “He said: ‘Go away from here. You’re no good to me anymore.’ He might as well have killed me.”

“Why did he say it, though?” I asked.

“Because of what happened,” my father said.

“What happened?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

I’d heard that before.

“Isn’t that why you brought me here?” I asked. “To learn to talk about it?”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s why you brought me here instead of letting me go with Mom, isn’t it? So I could look for things. So I could find things.”

My father nodded to himself silently. “I’m not sure.”

“I heard you,” I confessed. “You were fighting about it. She wanted me to go to England with her, but you said you needed me to go with you. You said you didn’t know why, but you felt it so powerfully, you
couldn’t deny it. If she didn’t let you take me here, you would probably die. And with that kind of a threat, what was she supposed to do?”

“Is that how it happened?” he asked. “I don’t remember.”

“I remember,” I said. “That’s how it happened. Just because you don’t know the reason doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”

“Then I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said softly, and he climbed the stairs for his room.

I didn’t know what I was doing. I was going by instinct; I was following my intuition. I’d read enough fairy tales to know that, if my heart was true, I’d be able to do the right thing for all of us; I could save us all. And I’d read enough Kafka to know that, if I did it wrong, it might lead to the end of all things.

L
ater that night, I was writing down my thoughts about the wooden hand as well as why my father felt it was so necessary for me to accompany him on this trip, when I heard a soft knocking at my door. Serena opened the door without waiting for a reply.

“May I come in?” she asked, poking her head into the room and then stepping inside.

She was wearing a nightdress of thin, white cotton, held up by two narrow straps. It left her shoulders exposed, and her ankles and toes. She perched on the end of my bed. She had washed the makeup from her face, and her skin was scrubbed and vibrant. The oscillating fan that chirped like a bird as it turned left, but not when it turned right, blew a strand of auburn hair across her face. She tucked the hair behind her ear and smiled at me.

“Do you have a moment?” she asked.

No, I thought. I have no moments, because time has stopped with Aunt Serena.

“Sure.”

“I think it’s sweet that you’re bonding with your grandfather. I can see that he’s taken to you, and it’s important that he has this personal connection. But before you become too emotionally involved, I think it’s only fair to clarify what I’ve already mentioned to you: Grandpa Samuel is ill, and his prognosis is death.”

“Isn’t everyone’s prognosis death?” I asked after a moment.