A Sudden Light: A Novel (30 page)

Harry isn’t in the cottage—but where? Ben must find him.

He sees the note on the table:
A nice day for a climb.

He smiles. Indeed, it is a nice day for a climb. And since Harry’s shoulder has healed enough for him to climb again, he has been climbing nearly every day!

He runs out of the cottage, down another path and deeper into the thicket until he comes to the tree—the tallest for miles and miles. The entire area from Mukilteo to Seattle had been clear-cut years ago; only The North Estate was saved. And this tree is the grandest of them all. At the base of the tree he looks up into the branches. Harry is there. Climbing up or down, Ben doesn’t know.

“Harry!” Ben shouts at the figure so far above him, a hundred fifty feet or more, tangled in the branches. “Harry!”

The figure stops and looks down between his legs.

“Join me!” comes the return call.

“Come down!” Ben yells. “I have news!”

“News?”

“Come down!”

And so the figure descends. Ben can feel his blood as it courses through his veins, that’s how attuned he is to his own body. Because he is free.

“Hurry!”

Harry descends quickly. He is barefoot and bare-handed, a rope coiled over his shoulder and neck to use as a flip line.

“What is it?” Harry asks, still on his descent.

“She’s set us free, Harry! She’s set us free! I don’t have to marry her!”

Harry stops to look down at Ben.

“What of your father’s impending deal?”

“She said not to worry. She would take care of it. She would talk to her
father. Don’t you see, Harry? You told me to be true to myself. I was honest with her, and she understood, Harry. She understood!”

“Ha, ha!” Harry laughs boldly. “So you see!”

“I see!”

Harry hurries down the tree. Faster. Like a spider, he zips down from limb to limb, lithe and nimble.

“Be careful!” Ben warns, but Harry laughs and moves even faster; he is almost to the lowest branch.

And then it happens, as if they both knew it would. Harry misses a grip on a branch and he slips.

“Harry!” Ben cries.

Harry lunges out and grabs hold of the lowest branch as his legs flail dangerously below him. He dangles from the branch by his hands.

“Phew!” he calls out with a laugh. “That was close!”

“Are you all right?” Ben calls to him.

“Yes.”

“Climb up, then. You’re giving me a fright.”

Harry pulls himself up and throws his left arm over the branch. He prepares to swing his leg up and over when they both hear a loud pop. Harry cries out, loses his grip again, and drops down so he is hanging by his hands.

“What is it?” Ben calls.

“My shoulder. It’s out again.”

And with that, Harry’s left arm comes free from the branch and falls to his side. He holds on with only one hand.

Ben is filled with dread. Harry’s shoulder. The one Ben dislocated.

“Can you hold on?” he calls to Harry, but he already knows the answer. “Hold on. I’ll get my gear from the barn. I’ll come up to get you.”

“Don’t go, Ben.”

“Why not? Hold on for two minutes and I’ll be back. You can do it.”

“I can’t—”

“Harry, just try.”

“No,” Harry says. “Ben. I don’t want to be alone when I die.”

“Harry, don’t be absurd, just hang on for one minute—”

Harry’s grip slackens. He can’t hold on any longer. He falls.

Almost in slow motion, he drops toward the ground, not flailing, not crying out. Drifting, almost. Floating down so gently, as if angels are supporting him, cradling him.

He hits with a sickening thud and Ben cries out. Harry, his love, lies broken on the ground at Ben’s feet, legs twisted beneath him, arms splayed, one of them a distortion, too far from his body. Ben falls to his knees.

Harry’s eyes are open and are bright red with burst blood vessels. Blood trickles from his mouth and ears, and from his nose, bubbles of blood form as he tries to suck air into his lungs.

Harry!

Ben touches his face gently. Harry, what have you done? He leans over and kisses Harry and comes away with blood on his lips. Harry’s blood.

Harry sucks in a final breath, and then his body is racked with a spasm. The air escapes with a wheeze, his body relaxes, and his eyes become vacant because his soul has left. Harry is dead.

Ben screws his face tight in agony. Tears spring from his eyes and fly from his cheeks as if they are afraid of him. He lifts his face to the sky and howls, unleashing a sound that frightens the birds and deer and freezes all who can hear the echoes, which go on for miles. He lifts Harry to his chest and clings to him, crying, unable to bear the anguish until he finds the energy to raise his face and howls again, and again.

In flashes, I see the rest. Ben carries Harry’s corpse to the barn and lays him out on the workbench. The barn is full of woodworking tools used by the artisans who built Riddell House, and Ben sets to work building a coffin. All night he builds, and in the morning he is finished. He places Harry in the coffin and uses a two-wheeled cart to haul the coffin up Observatory Hill, where he digs a grave. Before he is finished, the rain comes. The hole begins to fill with water and mud, but Ben perseveres, because nothing will stop him. I wish I could help him, as he fights against
the crumbling walls of the earth, frustrated, distraught. And somehow, I know that I can. I believe that I can. And so I take up a shovel, climb into the hole, and join him.

Ben stops digging momentarily, looks up at me, nods in acknowledgment.

Together, we dig Harry’s grave.

I
stopped in the foyer at the bottom of the stairs. I touched Harry’s carved wooden hand. I looked over my shoulder; the morning sun hadn’t moved around to the front of the house yet. But the hand was warm, as if warmed by the sun. I knew that the hand truly held the energy of the house and created its own warmth.

I thought about it again, but things were foggy: When did I start having Ben’s dreams? How long had we been there? I started having the dreams after I found the hand in the barn. But when did I first see Isobel dance? When did I find the shaft and meet Ben in the basement? After the hand had been returned to the newel. When Grandpa Samuel took away the hand years ago, Ben struggled to be heard, and the family fractured. Isobel was right: the hand was the source of power of the Riddell House. Benjamin could now be heard, even if only by me.

We’d been there more than a week. Of that I was sure.

The haunting image of digging Harry’s grave with Ben overwhelmed
me with sadness. I felt the need to do something physical to clear my mind, so I joined Grandpa Samuel in the barn. He’d taught me to use the lathe so that’s what I would do. I would tool a chair leg. I tightened a piece of squared-off two-by-four between the headstock and the tail-stock. I set the tool rest, took up my chisel, and started the spindle spinning. Making slow, careful passes, I cut into the wood as I moved the chisel along the tool rest, pass after pass, until it was close to cylindrical. I stopped the lathe and eyed up my creation. It was a dowel, though a little lopsided. I realized after trying it a few times how much practice Grandpa Samuel must have needed to turn out the elaborately tooled spindles he did; I was clearly not good at it.

Still, even though it didn’t serve any purpose, there was something satisfying about it. The smell of the wood. The touch of it. The sound. And then taking my dowel and using the gouge, which peeled away curly ribbons of wood, widening the groove as it deepened. It was a sensory experience, which supported Isobel’s theory that we are here in this world only to use our senses. To eat and drink and sweat and feel afraid and feel contented, and, ultimately, to love.

As Grandpa Samuel and I worked on the lathe that morning, I felt my sadness lifting. The focus and concentration demanded by the work gave me great relief, and I felt satisfied. I wanted to practice until my chair legs were as perfect as those turned by Grandpa Samuel, who had been tooling chair legs for years as part of an assembly line that had no other stations. I wondered if one day a man would show up with a truck to take away the spindles. “I’m ready for those ten thousand chair legs I ordered,” he would say. And we would all be amazed that Grandpa Samuel had been working on his lathe for a reason.

Maybe that man would be God.

“Take it off the spindle,” Grandpa Samuel said to me.

I removed the chair leg from the lathe.

“Feel it,” he said.

The wood was warm and fragrant. I felt like Harry must have felt
when he carved Ben’s hand. The soul of the wood braiding with my spirit, with the spirits who lived in the Post-it notes, and the playing cards stashed in the walls. Riddell House breathed. It moved. It slunk along so slowly we didn’t notice.

At lunchtime, I took Grandpa Samuel up the hill to the house and made sandwiches. Serena was at work, but there was plenty of roasted turkey in the refrigerator, and Serena had baked bread earlier, so it was nice and soft. My father had been in a closed-door session all morning with Richard in the library. I didn’t know what they were talking about—check that—I knew
exactly
what they were talking about; I didn’t know what they were saying. I finished making the sandwiches, got a bag of potato chips from the pantry, and a couple of Cokes from the icebox.

Grandpa Samuel’s T-shirt had a red and blue logo on it, and it read:

WE DON’T HAVE TO CARE

WE’RE EXXON

AT EXXON WE’RE PART OF THE PROBLEM

He smiled at me and squinted his eyes. He had a big mouthful of food and he was chewing and chewing. He took a long drink of Coke.

“Tendons,” he said.

He stopped chewing and got a strange look on his face. He reached into his mouth with his thumb and forefinger and fished about. He withdrew a piece of turkey and placed it on his plate.

“I don’t like tendons,” he said.

I didn’t think Grandpa Samuel was crazy. I wasn’t even sure he was demented. But I
knew
that he was very strange.

“Do you want me to check your turkey for tendons?” I asked. “I tried to get them all—”

He cut me off with a confident shake of his head.

“Good sandwich,” he said, evidently pleased enough to continue eating.

As we were finishing up lunch, I heard the library door crack open, and soon Richard and my father came into the kitchen. Richard was
unburdened; my father was carrying the big blue binder and some other folders, which he set on the table. Richard said hello briefly, nodded to my father, and then left. My father sat down at the table.

“That looks good,” he said, eyeing our sandwiches.

“I don’t like onions,” Grandpa Samuel said.

“Can’t you take them out if you don’t like them?” my father asked him.

“I didn’t put any in his,” I interjected. “He’s not complaining about something or needing to fix something. He’s making a statement of fact. That’s what he does. He’s like a living Magic 8 Ball. You shake him up and turn him over and he’ll say something. Sometimes it makes sense; sometimes it doesn’t.”

“Wow,” my father said. “Where have
I
been?”

“Mount Sovern Academy!” Grandpa Samuel blurted out. “A
decent
education.”

My father laughed and looked at me.

“Think about that for a second,” he said. “There are ten thousand schools out there that provide a ‘superlative’ education, or an ‘excellent’ education, or a ‘fabulous’ education. My father sent me away to a school that provided a ‘decent’ education.”

I did not indulge my father in his self-pity.

“Do you want me to make you a sandwich?” I asked.

“I’d love it if you did,” he replied. “But I sense it may fuel resentment, so I can make my own.”

“I’ll do it.”

So I made him a sandwich—with onions—while he shuffled through his papers and Grandpa chewed his tendons. When I returned to the table with a plate for my father—including a pickle spear—I saw that he had unrolled some drawings—a survey of some kind—and opened the binder to lay out an array of colorful brochures. He thanked me for the sandwich and took a bite, while admiring his display.

I picked up a brochure for a retirement community. Kensington
House. It sounded positively regal. It was located in Bothell, near the northern end of Lake Washington. The brochure was full of photos of old people smiling and laughing, playing bridge and croquet, visiting museums and attending concerts in parks. It looked pretty good. If I were old, I’d want to live there. They had a book club on Tuesday nights. They did yoga, and they had three restaurants plus a café on the grounds.

“I apologize for getting upset the last time we broached this topic,” my father said to Grandpa Samuel.

“Topic?” Grandpa Samuel asked.

“The future of Riddell House,” my father said.

Grandpa Samuel got a sour look on his face. He leaned back and stared at his plate and chewed the inside of his cheek. His eyes got cloudy, as if he’d turned off his mind.

“Or not,” my father added.

I felt a twisting in my gut: a pang of guilt or inner conflict. Again, I was forced to confront my dilemma. Of course I wanted my father to succeed, to get some money, and then to fly to England with me so he, my mother, and I could live happily ever after as a family. But, at the same time, I didn’t want my father to succeed by destroying what was left of Ben’s legacy. I wanted to come through for Ben. As much as I wanted my father to succeed, so I wanted my father to fail. I wondered what would have happened if I’d gone with my mother to England for the summer and had never seen Riddell House. Oh, the whimsy of fate.