The Widow's House Read online

  I WAS AWOKEN to the sound of someone crying. I looked at the clock and saw, surprise, that it was 3:36 A.M. The time the crying started. Those foxes must be able to tell time, I told myself, turning over and spooning myself against Jess’s back. He groaned and moved away and I knew if I woke him he’d be angry.

  I won’t be able to write in the morning if I don’t get a good night’s sleep, he’d say.

  So I lay on my back listening to the warbly wail carried on the wind through our open bedroom window. It didn’t sound like a fox. And it couldn’t be coming from Sunny’s barn since Sunny was gone for the night. I rose up on one elbow and listened harder, but it was like the taste of the Sommerfelds—the harder you tried to pin it down, the more it eluded you. The sound was growing weaker—like a baby that’d worn itself out—

  I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. The floor was cold against my bare feet, the breeze coming through the open window chilly. I pulled on a sweatshirt—a new Bailey’s one Jess had surprised me with last week to make up for the one he’d given away—and crept out of the room softly so as not to wake him. I pulled on rubber boots and opened the front door slowly so it wouldn’t creak.

  Once I knew where the sound was coming from it wouldn’t trouble me any longer. My father had taught me that. Face your fears, he had said, when he made me go up into the attic to see it wasn’t inhabited by Great-Granny Jackson’s ghost thump-dragging her feet across the floor, only a family of mice that had taken up residence in an old trunk. When he saw the trunk was full of old women’s shoes—the left ones each with a built-up heel to correct an uneven gait—he had looked at me a little funny. Still, once he’d thrown out the trunk and drowned the mice I never heard the shuffling limp overhead or glimpsed the lopsided shadow on the walls of my bedroom again.

  I stepped outside into the night. A cloud cover had rolled in, muting the moonlight but also taking the bite out of the cold. Overcast nights and clear days make for a good apple harvest, my father would say. Now that I was outside I could hear that the night was full of sounds—the faint buzz of the last crickets still hanging on until the first hard frost—the whistle of the Amtrak train, the hum of the river flowing south, and, as if in answer to my waiting, the hoot of a barred owl.

  Who who who waits for you?

  Maybe it had been the owl I’d heard before. I’d heard barred owls cough and growl, and the babies screeched like hyenas, but when the owl paused in its endless question (who, indeed, I always wondered, waits for me?) I heard it. A baby crying, weak now, but all the more insistent as if it didn’t have much time left. It definitely wasn’t coming from Sunny’s barn, though. It was coming from the gardens.

  I headed out across the mown hay field, wading through ankle-deep fog that looked like curdled milk in the muted moonlight, the plaintive cry growing louder in my ears until it blocked out all the other sounds of the night.

  After that visit to the attic I’d heard my father ask my mother if I might have overheard that Great-Granny Jackson had one leg shorter than the other, but she’d scoffed at the notion that she’d waste her breath talking about that crazy old woman. But what can you expect from the girl? she had asked. Given where she was born. That’s when I found out that I’d been born in the Hudson River Mental Hospital, where my birth mother had been an inmate—and when I learned that Trudy Jackson didn’t love me. Something I should have cottoned on to years before, only I’d held on to the idea that all the strictness—the thumbtacks in the tablecloth, the mouth washing with soap, the times she locked me in the closet for lying—were signs of love. They weren’t. What I realized after the attic was that Trudy was afraid of me and I soon learned to use that to my advantage. If I wanted something—piano lessons, books, new shoes, things Trudy considered frivolous—I’d only have to look over her shoulder as if I’d just glimpsed the ghost of lame, crazy Great-Granny Jackson hovering in the air and she’d agree just to get away from me. It wasn’t love, but in some ways it made my life easier. My father was right. It was better to face up to things. Just as it was better, I thought, wiping the dampness from my face, to know where this damned sound was coming from.

  When I reached the edge of the field I got my answer. The sound was coming from the pond. I could hear mucusy hiccups coming from the far shore where the fog was thickest and where, I recalled, there was a walkway over the weir. Where I’d seen the figure standing the day we moved up.

  But that had only been a tree, I reminded myself as I walked cautiously around the pond, going around the west side to avoid the bog I’d stepped in that first day. As for the weeping sound . . .

  As I came around the west side of the pond I made out the wooden bridge emerging from the fog. The crying sound came from the other side of the weir where the fog was billowing upward, roiling the air like cream in a churn, thickening . . .

  Into a shape . . . a figure . . .

  I froze, my feet sinking into the cold mud, and stared, willing the figure to vanish, to dispel into mist and air.

  But instead it thickened—the way pudding thickens as you stir it, quickening under the spoon into something gleaming and firm—into a woman in a long dress, her head covered, clutching something to her chest.

  I only made out the shape for an instant, but in that short moment the woman looked at me out of the hollow spaces in the fog where the black of night pressed through. I could feel that darkness bearing down on me with the weight of cold stone, holding me motionless even as I wanted to run from the horror of that ravaged, empty face.

  But that was what she wanted me to feel. Horror that she’d been driven to this moment, standing on the edge of the weir, with her child in her arms, ready to take its life and her own. They have driven me to it. I heard the words in my head as though they had been spoken aloud. They filled me with ice water, as if the contents of the pond had been poured into my body.

  And then she was gone. The image dispelled into the air as if it had turned to water and been poured over the weir and washed out to sea. And with it the icy hold on me melted and I fell to my knees in the mud, my legs weak as water, the only sound left in the night my own heart pounding.

  When I was able to get up I walked up onto the bridge, but of course it was empty. You imagined it, I told myself, a trick of fog and moonlight. The weeping had been the sound of the water moving over the weir. As I turned to go back to the cottage, I slipped, nearly falling over the weir, and landing hard on my knee. As I braced myself to get up I saw what had made me slip. Although the night was warm, the boards under me were coated with ice.

  Chapter Eight

  The first thing I did the next morning was check the overnight temperatures on the Weather Channel. There was a cold front coming in the wake of a tropical storm that was supposed to just miss our area, but it had only gone down to the fifties in Poughkeepsie, high forties in Albany. Across the river, west in the Catskills, it had gone below freezing, but not here in the sheltered river valley of the Hudson.

  That was why the area was ideal for growing apples, my father had explained to me more than once. The river—and the fog that came off the river and covered the orchards like a warm blanket—kept the temperatures temperate, giving the apples time to ripen. But then, as Monty had said, the climate up here played its tricks. I knew from my father that there were dozens of microclimates folded into the hills and dales of the valley, so that a killing frost might leave one orchard unscathed while destroying another man’s harvest.

  That’s what had happened in the winter of 1930. An ice storm had destroyed half the trees in the Jackson orchards, but had spared the Corbetts. That’s why the Corbetts had been able to buy us out.

  They took our luck, my father said once, looking after Dunstan and his brothers when they roared by on their tractor. And then they took our land.

  When I asked my mother why he resented the Corbetts so much she’d said his grandmother had filled him with some nonsense about a curse on the family. She was a bitter, c
razy old lady, Trudy had told me. She worked as a servant in one of the big houses and it turned her head. Made her think she was better than other folks. She told me when I couldn’t have babies that it was the curse. When I told her we’d adopt instead she said I was crazy bringing a stranger into the house. That no good ever came of that.

  No wonder I had imagined Great-Granny Jackson thump-dragging her uneven feet across the attic floor, down the attic stairs, and into my bedroom, where her lopsided shadow told me I didn’t belong in her house.

  As Jess said, if I didn’t use my imagination, it would use me.

  Jess came into the house from his morning walk while I was checking the Weather Channel. I switched it off quickly because I knew he hated the sound of television in the morning when he was getting ready to write—hated the sound of any voices other than the ones inside his own head—so I was surprised when he spoke to me.

  “Did you get up in the middle of the night?” he asked.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you—”

  “You didn’t,” he said absently, already moving to his desk and flipping open his laptop. “I just woke up and noticed you were gone. Bad dream?”

  “No, I . . .” If I told him that I’d woken to the sound of a baby crying—that I’d been waking at 3:36 every morning to a baby crying—he’d only worry. If I told him I’d followed it out into the night and seen a figure standing on the weir he might do more than worry. “I had an idea—something I wanted to get down,” I said instead.

  He looked up from his laptop. “A writing idea?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I mean, nothing big, just an inkling—” I snatched my old notebook out of my bag. “I’ve been going through my old stories and one of them sparked something.”

  “That’s great,” he said, getting up from his desk. He put his arms around me and pressed me to his chest. His flannel shirt smelled like cut hay. He must have been walking across the field. I wondered if he’d noticed my footprints . . . “I’m really glad you’re writing again. You always seemed . . . happier when you were writing.”

  Had I?

  “Do you want to write here today?” he asked, gesturing toward his desk. “Monty said I could use one of the rooms in the house if I needed it.”

  “No!” I said, shocked that he’d offered to give up his desk. “I mean . . . I have some stuff to look up. I thought I’d go to the town library and work there.”

  “Good,” he said, giving me another hug, his eyes already straying back to his laptop. “Lucky you can write in public places like that.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Lucky.”

  JESS HAD ALWAYS marveled at my ability to write in public places. The truth was they were the only places in which I felt safe writing. I’d found that out in high school when I tried to write a story about Great-Granny Jackson in my bedroom and conjured up the thump-drag footsteps overhead. Better to write in the school cafeteria or Cassie’s (Pete’s, back then) or the library.

  And I did have some things to look up in their historical records archives. I could see if there was something about the apple blossom girl in there that I could use if I rewrote the story I’d started writing fourteen years ago. Jess was right. I was happier when I was writing. I needed something to keep my mind busy, to keep me from conjuring up ghostly cries and figures in the night.

  I looked up at Riven House as I drove past. The morning mist was burning off, rising in smoky vapors from the grass as though from scorched earth. The house rose from the last remains of the fog as though rising out of a dream, the bricks on the east side turning a warm red in the sun. Like the mist burning off the fields, the memory of that figure I’d seen last night was already dissipating. It slipped further away as I made the drive into town. The morning bustle of Concord—the yellow buses stopping ahead of me to take on children in warm jackets and teenagers underdressed in sweatshirts and skimpy dresses, the farm stand putting out a sign for apples, pumpkins, and a “haunted orchard,” hunters in camo-wear filling their thermoses at the Stewart’s, Katrine putting out an open house sign in front of her office, Bailey students waiting for the shuttle—all of it felt too normal to occupy the same world as that ghostly apparition standing above the weir.

  It had been an illusion born of fog and sleep deprivation, a vivid, powerful dream—I could still feel the grief and horror radiating out of those black-hole eyes—but a dream nonetheless. And a dream didn’t mean I was crazy. It had come out of rereading my own story just as my childhood illusion of Great-Granny Jackson had no doubt come from overhearing my parents talk about how she had warned them against adopting me. Instead of cowering in fear I could write the apple blossom girl’s story. As Jess said, I could either use my imagination or it would use me. I’d write a story about the apple blossom girl—maybe even a novel, a little voice whispered—and then she would stop haunting my dreams.

  I stopped at Cassie’s for a coffee to go and drank it walking the two blocks to the town library. I sat on a bench outside finishing my coffee, enjoying the Indian summer weather (freakish after that frost last night) and bracing myself to go inside. The library was another relic of my past to face. I’d spent hours in the town library in my childhood and adolescence, tucked away in a back corner reading everything I could. Old Mrs. Trowbridge, head librarian throughout my childhood, had gotten to know me well enough to put aside books she thought I’d like, classics like Jane Eyre and Rebecca, but also surprises like the short stories of Lorrie Moore, who, she told me, had grown up not far from here and whose success showed that a girl from a small town in upstate New York could become a famous writer.

  Of course Mrs. Trowbridge was long gone. Retired if not dead. The woman behind the desk was around my age and, with her retro black-framed square glasses, heavy black bangs, and vintage-y cardigan, tweed skirt, and bright yellow tights, looked more like she hailed from Brooklyn than Concord. She was clearly one of the new breed of hipster librarians that had come out of my cohort. In fact, my guess was that she was a Bailey student who’d gone up to SUNY Albany for her library degree and then come back to the area to work. She was shelving books when I came in, but stopped to ask if she could help me. I noticed her nametag read CJ BRENNAN.

  “There used to be a local history section . . .” I began, peering through the stacks to the alcove where I remembered the archives had been kept. Where there had been a dark corner was now a cheerful nook full of children’s books and a bronze plaque reading THE ELIZABETH TROWBRIDGE MEMORIAL CHILDREN’S READING CORNER. Next to it was a sign with a picture of a cell phone and a line drawn through it. I reached into my bag and thumbed the ringer off on my phone as the librarian replied.

  “Yeah, there still is but I moved it to another room when we got the funding for the children’s section. It’s in here now.”

  She opened a door to what I expected would be a dusty closet crammed with old newspapers but which turned out to be a clean and orderly room lined with file cabinets, well-polished glass bookcases, and a reading table, above which the apple blossom girl looked out at me with eyes as dark and deep as the black holes I’d met last night.

  “Was there something in particular you were looking for?” CJ Brennan asked me.

  “Yes,” I said, feeling cold as I stepped closer to the picture. “Her.”

  CJ BRENNAN SHOWED me where the old issues of the Concord Gazette were kept. “They’re on microfilm too, but I’ve filed all the print issues in acid-free binders if you’d rather look through them. They’re your best source for local history. The crowning of the Apple Blossom Queen was a big event, so you’ll just have to look through all the May issues in the twenties to find her.”

  Monty had said his father had come down from Harvard in the spring of 1929, so I started there. I found the article in the May 2 issue, along with a larger version of the same picture that hung in the library. “Local beauty is pick of the crop,” the headline read. And then below in smaller print: “Mary Foley, age seventeen, named Apple Blossom Quee
n at annual May Fair.”

  Mary Foley. The name didn’t sound familiar, but then it was such an ordinary name—there had been many Foleys in my school—that it wouldn’t.

  I looked closer at the picture. Next to Mary was a young man in a striped suit, his face shaded by a straw boater, only his even white teeth catching the flash of the camera. He had the same wicked grin as Monty when he told us an off-color story about some literary luminary he’d rubbed up against. The man in the picture was looking at Mary Foley as if he’d like to gobble her up. Bayard Montague looked years younger than his portrait hanging in the rotunda, even though the portrait couldn’t have been done more than a year later, since he hadn’t lived much longer than that.

  I scanned the line of farmers and small town businessmen and found one other familiar person in the photograph, her uneven shoulders giving her away: my great-grandmother, Mildred Jackson, in a high-necked black dress and white apron. It gave me a chill to see her there, as if the ghost of my childhood had found its way into my present. But it wasn’t surprising for her to be in the picture. The Jacksons were prosperous orchard owners back then. Mildred was probably on the pie baking contest committee or some such thing.

  I looked back at Mary Foley. She was glowing. She looked like she’d been dipped in dew and polished. Even in the black-and-white photograph you knew her cheeks were as pink as the blossoms that crowned her head and her lips, which were slightly parted, would be as red and glossy as a candy apple. You could practically smell the apple blossoms.