The Writing on the Wall: A Novel (13 page)

I nodded just to be rid of it, that moist hateful breath down my ear. The men pulled Lawrence to his feet and took him back to one of the trucks. Someone else ran to help Alan. Mr. Steen and his cronies walked backwards from the river, using pine boughs to sweep snow over their boot prints. Mrs. Steen and the driver tugged me over to the truck and forced me in.

I was sick after that. All the novels I read as a girl, in almost every one, the heroines come down with brain fever after suffering their tragedies. It was not brain fever I had, it was only the flu, but it still kept me in bed for a very long time. Alan would not leave my side at first, though we never talked. One night I woke from my delirium and it was not Alan sitting by the bed but Miss Norian, the friend of Mrs. Steen, and she was tearing out the pages from a book and using them to blow her nose. With the other hand she was stroking back Peter’s hair which rested on her lap like a soft brown pillow—and I hated her for daring to touch him, though I knew it was only my fever.

Gradually I grew better and then one day Alan said he would leave me alone and go off to work. Later that afternoon I felt strong enough to walk downstairs and after resting a bit in the parlor I decided to go outside for some air. There was a path shoveled through the snow to the road. I was all the way there, turning to come back, when I noticed a black truck parked fifty yards away. There was a man behind the wheel and he did not seem to be doing anything but watching. Watching the house. Watching me. As I got better, as Alan began leaving me along for a longer time each day, the truck remained there, or a similar truck, with a similar driver, so I was always watched.

And I knew that this is how it would be. It would always be that way. It would be that way until I gave them what they wanted.

“I have wonderful news,” I told Alan on Valentine’s Day when he brought me candy. “We will be having a baby. There can be no mistaking the signs.”

“A son! Why I’m sure of it, Beth!”

“I’m sure, too.”

The next day when I went out for my walk the truck was gone.

How long I can fool them I do not know but it will not have to be for long. Alan feels confident enough to go on a trip to the city with lumber and will be gone five days. “I’ll hang the wallpaper while you’re away,” I told him. “At last I have the time and when you come home it will be finished, every room.”

“You’ll be careful on the ladder?” he said, leaning over to kiss me.

“I’ll be careful.”

“Wonderful. Why that’s just wonderful, Beth. Mother will be so pleased.”

I will begin hanging the paper the moment I finish this sentence and I will work very carefully until every wall is covered and I will leave my story behind and I will never stop hating them and in springtime when they least expect it I will go.

T
hree

VERA
stayed in touching distance as she read. Move close to the wall and the words blurred. Move back and they became squiggles. By the time she finished she was running her finger under each line like a first-grader, tracing out the story all the way to its end. Her arm ached from doing this, her back hurt from standing, and she felt chilled in a way even a July night couldn’t touch.

But this was nothing compared to how the last word affected her. The last word detached itself from the wall, took on shape, form, and substance, to the point she had the sensation she wasn’t reading it but accepting it in her hand. It was a better trick than any poltergeist could manage, any goblin—it was a real hand that had come out to take hers, warm, girlish, pleading. Sensing this, she grabbed hard, closed her fist around the word trying as best she could to summon all her courage and send it back ninety years.

go

She grimaced, she concentrated so hard. And almost immediately, as if a century was nothing, she felt a matching pressure back. A message—but could she read it? None of the meanings she came up with described the sensation adequately. Sisterhood, but that seemed too girly-girly and easy. Kinship? That was closer. Solidarity? An old-fashioned word she had never quite understood, but she understood now and she closed her eyes to it, clenched her hand so tight she felt dizzy and had to reach out to the wall again, this time to keep from falling.

It didn’t last long, the hand sensation. The word released her, flattened itself back to its place there on the bottom right corner. A punctured
g
, a deflated
o
. She left the lantern on the ladder, kicked through torn wallpaper toward the door, stumbled down the darkened hall through the kitchen out to the yard. The word had released her from its grip but not its meaning.
Go
it said.
Go!

She started for the car, remembered the key was upstairs in her purse. And even if she had the keys there was no way to out-drive what she was feeling. Instead, she pushed her way through the gate and began walking north along the road’s weedy shoulder. The ground was wet, swamp plants and nettles swung heavily at her legs, but she kept going, concentrating on each step so as not to slip. The fireflies were finished now, there were no chartreuse motes, but the crickets had started up. Their sound wasn’t the pleasant one crickets were supposed to make, but something so harsh and percussive she covered her ears.

She walked until the house was well behind her, turned to get her bearings on its light, then kept on until she came to the neighbor’s house, the one she often stared at on her breaks, where Asa Hogg had lived, the Civil War veteran. And no one since, judging by the look of it. If Jeannie’s house resembled a haunted house in a bad Hollywood film, then this one looked plucked from a fairytale, where the forest clasped everything in its enchanted embrace. The moon’s brightness exaggerated the effect. Vines not only covered the siding and roof, they seemed to be the only thing keeping them from collapsing. A birch tree grew through the broken boards of the porch and lichen covered its shingles in silvery fur. Saplings stooped and twisted to get inside—one branch grew into one window and looped back out the next. The forest wasn’t just hiding the house but eating it, gulp by greedy gulp.

She swung her hands at the vines until she opened a path to the nearest window, found a stick, made a swirling motion to clear away the broken teeth of glass. But when she peered in she could see nothing, and it took her several seconds to realize that this was because there was nothing inside to see. Where the floor had been was only the bitter damp smell of dirt; where the walls had been was nothing but ugly little dunes of plaster. There was no furniture, no sign of habitation. Time’s nibbles had swallowed the house whole.

She was pushing her way back through the vines when a car drove past on the road. This happened nine or ten times a day, but never once at night—the traffic in 1920 must surely have been heavier. Its headlights sliced across the house but missed her legs. She had a glimpse of the driver’s silhouette and he seemed to have a girl’s head leaning against his shoulder like in the old days when that’s what girlfriends did. The car slowed down near Jeannie’s house—were they looking for a place to be alone? The light, small as it was, must have scared them off, because whoever was driving floored it now and the red taillights shrank into insignificance and disappeared.

Jeannie’s house? No, Beth’s house. Beth’s house. Beth’s.

She had never really considered it from the distance before, not at night. The kerosene lamp she had left in the parlor threw rays out the window that resembled a campfire’s, fan-shaped and yellow. In the blackness, it was a brave and defiant sight, like someone was puffing on embers to keep them alive. Higher, with a crisper light, she could make out Scorpius and the swarming white band of the Milky Way. And it seemed the same even there—that a spirit was puffing and blowing to keep them alight.

There was nothing to explore in Asa Hogg’s house, no stories or secret messages. She walked back to the road, then stood there hesitating.
Go.
The imperative had taken her what—half a mile? She wondered how far it had taken Beth, that word added so defiantly on the end. Had she made it to the city? Had it been everything she dreamed of or did forces conspire to drive her right back?

She might have fled there herself, had she gotten in the car. Had she gotten in the car she would have driven all night to Boston’s airport and not come back. She was disappointed at the slowness of things, there was no use pretending otherwise. The job was barely half finished, there were two rooms left that had to be stripped even before she started on the papering, while that other job, the healing business, had hardly progressed at all. She wanted walls that were impassive so as to become impassive herself—but why had she ever imagined walls were impassive?

She thought of it again—the tactile sensation of grasping Beth’s hand. Comfort had been exchanged, in the deepest way possible, and it hadn’t just flowed from her hand back through time, it had flowed the other way, she had gained solace from listening to Beth’s voice. It was far more comfort than she had been able to send or receive through Cassie’s hand. In the stockade, in the miserably small room where they were allowed to visit after her court martial, they had been separated by a wire mesh screen that kept them from touching. The thirty minutes allotted them was over, Vera was nowhere near dealing yet with the shock and incomprehension that came with their talk, and yet, by instinct, needing it badly, she reached her hand out to touch Cassie’s before getting up to leave.

She was letting her hair grow long again—never had it looked so shiny and beautiful.

She remembered thinking that, of all possible things, and then a second later, worrying that maybe Cassie would turn and walk away with no gesture whatsoever. Then very slowly she did move her hand—low to the mesh where Vera’s hand already waited. They hadn’t touched. They hadn’t touched the way she touched Beth because a quarter inch of wire mesh in an army stockade is thicker, more impermeable than a hundred years’ worth of time.

But she was a liar, to remember it that way. When it came to touching, the truths a mother and daughter can exchange through their hands, she had been glad that the mesh was there.

She could lie to herself. She could fool herself, too. For when she woke up next morning it was with the fixed intention of stripping the sewing room wallpaper without paying any attention whatsoever to the writing underneath. Beth’s story still held her. The emotion could only lessen gradually, it didn’t need to be forced away by someone new.

Her resolution lasted about as long as it took to peel off the first strip. The new woman’s voice was simply too loud and insistent to ignore.
I can’t tell a story like she can.
Plain enough. But how was she going to tell it then?

The handwriting was sloppy, bold and fast, like the letters were racing each other, tripping over themselves, staggering back up again, making their erratic way to the finish line there in the corner. Whoever wrote it had a fondness for cheap ballpoints and liked different colors—by the end of the first paragraph she had already used blue, black, green and red. The lines sloped down, then rose back the other way like a crude drawing of waves. When she became passionate or angry she pressed too hard, pockmarking the plaster or even gouging it; the walls in the sewing room were in much worse shape than in the parlor.

Was that the reason she had chosen such thick wallpaper? Not just because she liked knotty pine? Not just because she was brassy and original and didn’t give a damn, but to cover up the damage? Someone using a chisel couldn’t have scarred the plaster much worse.

There were other reasons to start reading. The unknown woman had done Vera a huge favor by stripping off the first three layers, a job she would have found impossible on her own. This was a debt and a real one. Then, too, she was almost certainly the only other person to have read Beth’s story, which formed a bond that couldn’t be ignored.

She went back to the same method she had used with Beth, stripping bare the entire wall before allowing herself to read. With Beth, she had the sensation of words pressing outward on the paper and helping, but this woman’s words were gummier, they didn’t want to let go of the paper that covered them, so she had to work twice as hard.

She was halfway through the first wall, on the point of taking her morning coffee break, when something surprising happened—surprising only in the fact it hadn’t occurred sooner. It came from the radio, Jeannie’s boom box, which had been her trusted companion all through work. The station played the same lulling French music as always, soothing precisely because she didn’t understand a word, but then suddenly between songs the announcer said something she understood all too well.

“Iraq,” he said, rolling the
r.
There were more words she couldn’t understand, then two she could: “mort” and “soixantequinze.”

She felt betrayed, that was the strange thing. Mad at the radio, mad at Canada, mad at Quebec. She trusted them to stay neutral, and now here they were, deliberately targeting her, jabbing her with a needle, making fun of her—her desire for numbness, her vanity in thinking it was the easiest emotion in the world to achieve.

She turned it off, took it out to the hall, banished it from her hearing. She worked in silence, except for the steady scrapes and whispers made by the putty knife’s blade. Too quiet, she thought at first. But then she had the first wall cleared, she was stepping back to read what was written there, and all became noisy very fast.

I can’t tell a story like she can.
Can’t make you cry like she can wouldn’t care to wouldn’t know how. Oh plenty of tears alright a lifetime’s worth like everybody but most came on one terrible afternoon and that’s buried in the past now a lot thicker than these walls. Funny Dottie Peach who’s always ready with a wisecrack even a crude one even a mean one if somebody gets on my bad side and someday if I’m not careful it’s going to be Crazy Dottie Peach who can’t tell a story straight can’t even start at the beginning. But if what goes round comes round what does it matter where on the circle you start?