Blackbird House (24 page)

“I was the one to be pitied,” Emma said.

“Never,” Walker told her.
 
“Not you, kiddo.”

“You have to say that.
 
You’re a physician and can’t do any harm.”

“I’m your brother.
 
I could tease you unmercifully if I wanted to, harmful or not.
 
Enjoy the house.”

Emma planned to check out the farm, set it in order, and sell it as quickly as possible.
 
She was practical that way, and if her parents said now that the house belonged to her, she could sell it if she so desired.
 
To this end, Emma’s best friend and old college roommate, Callie Hecht, was enlisted to take a trip with her, back to the edge of the world.

“Perfect,” Callie had said right away when Emma phoned.
 
“It will be Midsummer’s Eve.
 
We can call up some spirits.”

Perfect also for Callie to leave behind her son and her daughter and her husband, David.
 
The good David, they called him, as opposed to Emma’s ex, the evil David, the David with no heart, the one who was convinced he was living with a ghost.
 
Callie was also leaving behind her family’s unruly black Lab, three cats, and a house in Nyack.
 
She was more than grateful for the downtime, and swore she didn’t mind going out of her way, driving to Boston to pick up Emma.
 
All the more time to be alone, she enthused.

“You want alone?”
 
Emma laughed.
 
“Welcome to my life.”

Callie double-parked on Commonwealth, and they packed up her station wagon with sleeping bags and pillows, along with huge amounts of groceries and bottles of wine, flashlights, candles, powdered milk, ground French-roast coffee.

“We’re only going for a weekend,” Callie reminded her friend.

“Trust me,” Emma had said.
 
“You’ll see.
 
There’s nothing there.”

The first thing Emma noticed when they pulled into the long dirt driveway was how abandoned the place looked.
 
She was surprised to realize that the image of the house she kept in mind, even now, was the house as it had been that first year.
 
She was glad that her mother couldn’t see what had happened to it.
 
So much paint had flaked off the shingles, the house barely looked white.
 
Part of the roof had flown off in a spring nor’easter, and the old summer kitchen had collapsed in the same storm and was now little more than a bundle of sticks.
 
The unwieldy sweet peas had so invaded the field that anyone wishing to get to the other side would need to wield an ax in order to walk through.

“I see what you mean,” Callie said.
 
“This is bleak.”
 
Then she and Emma got out of the car, and Callie shouted “Strawberries!”
 
and took off running in the direction of the field.

“Watch out for poison ivy!”
 
Emma yelled after her, but it was too late.
 
Callie was already deep into the poison ivy that always bordered the strawberry patch.
 
She was beginning to itch when it came time to unload the car.

“Well, at least I got us dessert,” Callie said.
 
“In exchange for my pains.”

The house was cold, the way abandoned houses are, the air inside cooler than the temperature outside.
 
Breathe out, and the air turned to crystals.
 
Breathe in, and it chilled to the bone.
 
They opened the windows, let in some heat and some sun, then made up the beds in the attic.
 
There was evidence of mice, and the rooms needed to be swept.
 
And all the while they were working, Callie was itching like mad.
 
In the afternoon, Emma drove down to the general store, in search of calamine lotion.
 
Siggy Maguire was working the register, as she had for years.
 
When Siggy realized who Emma was she inquired after her mother, then told Emma that last summer the renters they’d had had complained to everyone on the road that the house was haunted.
 
They said a white bird had frightened their son; when the teen-aged girls in the family started fooling around with a Ouija board they’d scared themselves silly, and the whole family had packed up and left.

“Good riddance,” Emma said smartly.

“My sentiments exactly.”
 
Siggy was very no-nonsense, and she’d always been so.
 
“Tell your mom I’m still picking blueberries up on your hill like she said I could.
 
They’re not going to waste.
 
If I had the time, I’d clear out some of that poison ivy near the strawberry patch.
 
I saw you lost a lot of trees and that shed of yours finally went down.
 
Your mom always called one of the Crosby boys to take care of such things.
 
I’ll do it for you if you like.”

Emma agreed, thanked Siggy, then bought more than she should have to be polite.
 
Along with the calamine lotion, she added another bottle of wine and some plum cakes, baked by Siggy’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth, just to be neighborly.

“I remember how cute you were when you first walked in here,” Siggy said as Emma was leaving.
 
“Your hair was just starting to grow back.”

“I must have looked terrible.”
 
Emma laughed, embarrassed. “Cueball.”

“Oh, no.
 
You were cute as could be.
 
That’s why I could still pick you out.
 
That sort of thing makes an impression.”

What sort of thing was that?
 
Emma wondered as she drove back to the house.
 
She took the long route, along the bay.
 
Everything smelled like salt and heat.
 
The eelgrass shimmered and the sand was covered with little scrambling crabs.
 
Today was the longest day of the year, and, oddly, Emma was glad for that.
 
She wanted the day to last.
 
She pulled over onto the side of the road and closed her eyes and tried to imagine walking into the general store at the age of seven, with her scraggly hair, unselfconscious.
 
Was she glad to be alive at that moment?
 
Did she thank Siggy Maguire for the Milky Way candy bar she was given for free, just for being her cute self on that summer day?
 
Just for having survived?

Emma got out of her car.
 
She could hear the drone of the cicadas.
 
She planned to go for a short run, but instead wound up racing along the inlets of the bay for over an hour.
 
There was sand in her shoes when she got back to the house.
 
Her skin was shiny with sweat and salt.

“Thank God you’re back,” Callie said by way of a greeting.
 
Itch-ridden Callie had actually been waiting for Emma at the front door.
 
Her arms were covered with poison-ivy bumps, even though she’d washed with the bar of brown soap she’d found in the bathroom.
 
Emma poured calamine lotion onto cotton and watched as Callie covered the rashy spots. “This place is hellish,” Callie said.
 
“While I was lying down I heard something underneath me.
 
I shouldn’t have looked, but I did.
 
There was a mouse under the bed.
 
I screamed and it ran away.
 
And then I ran away as well, and here I am, waiting for you.”

Emma laughed as she put away the provisions she’d bought at the store.

“It’s not funny You were right about this place.
 
It really is a wreck.
 
There’s no hot water, did you know that?
 
And the groceries you brought?
 
Well, good luck, because the refrigerator isn’t working.”

Emma went to the fridge, moved it out from the wall, fiddled with the plug, then adjusted the temperature.
 
ill: she said.
 
“Modern life.”

Callie was not impressed.
 
“I’m lying down.
 
If that mouse comes back, I’ll kill it.
 
I swear I will.
 
It is true what they say, this day really is endless.”

This longest day of the year was known as Johnmas, or Sailor’s Eve, a good time to ask for whatever it was a person wanted most.
 
It was the day that often marked the time sailors were in the middle of a sea voyage; most likely what they wanted most was to come home again.
 
They wanted the sight of oak trees and of willows, the taste of sweet green water that would quench their thirst, the sound of a woman’s voice, no matter what her tone might be.
 
When Callie went to lie down, Emma went out to explore the grounds and see what other damage she could find.
 
Tomorrow she would ask Siggy for the name of a trustworthy real-estate agent, but for now she simply enjoyed the quiet.
 
The pond was brackish, but there were still those Egyptian water lilies Emma had always liked.
 
They looked like bits of sunlight on the dark-green water.
 
Bits and pieces of gold.

She walked over to explore the field of sweet peas.
 
It would take a tractor to get rid of them all.
 
Emma startled the finches feeding on purple thistle as she walked along the edges of the field; she could hear a skittering in the tall grass field mice, most probably, or those little voles that made their way underground to the tender est garden shoots.
 
Halfway through the field, Emma tripped over a clod or a bump.
 
She bent and found something odd: a row of undersized turnips were growing there.
 
Emma got down on her hands and knees and dug them out.
 
She took the turnips back to the house, got out an old cookbook, and had a steamy broth cooking by the time Callie came down from her nap.

“Yum,” Callie said, but when she took her first spoonful of the soup, she burst into tears.
 
“I miss my family,” she admitted.
 
“Can you believe it?
 
I must be crazy.”

Emma tasted the turnip broth just a spoonful, really but her eyes grew moist as well.
 
Crying turnips, truth-teller’s turnips, sweet, but somewhat difficult to eat.
 
Emma had the feeling that if she took another spoonful she’d soon be under some sort of spell.

“Maybe we’re meant to have a pizza.”
 
Emma spilled the broth down the sink, and the two friends went out to a local bar, where they ordered a clam pizza and a large pitcher of beer, and soon felt much better.
 
On the ride back to the farm, the sky was still light.
 
There were ribbons of pale blue, and a pink tint that looked burning hot, heaven set on fire.

“Midsummer’s Night,” Callie said.
 
“When you become who it is you really are.”

As they turned into the driveway, the approaching dark was already filling with fireflies.
 
They ran into the house and rummaged around for two glass jars, then returned to the lawn to catch their prey, grabbing in the dark for the blinking globes of light.
 
They brought the jars into the house and drank red wine in a kitchen that was illuminated only by fireflies.
 
They got old books off the shelf, ones that had belonged to Walker when he was a boy.
 
They read Indian stories about turtles that had made islands in the sea, and about a Viking named Thorwald who was said to be buried on a beach nearby, along with the ballast from his ship.
 
They read that whales were thought to have the ability to chart the way home through the centuries, even when the landscape changed, when inlets were filled in and dike roads were built where once there had only been water.
 
For them, the map remained the same.

At midnight, Emma and Callie went back out to the lawn with the fireflies.
 
They set them all free, unscrewing the jars in the meadow, making certain to avoid the poison ivy.
 
Emma spun in a circle, and the light reflected off her skin.
 
If this was the night when a person’s deepest self was revealed, then what was inside Emma as she twirled in the field, with the scent of pine and salt in the air?
 
What she wished for most was to be the self she might have been if she’d never been sick, the person she could have become if she hadn’t been stopped in some way, if she hadn’t stopped herself.
 
She looked at her hands in the firefly light, and she thought her husband had been right all along: she hadn’t been there.

The next morning, Emma went down to the general store while Callie slept in.
 
She bought the Boston Globe and some pancake mix, and then, at the very last moment, a bucket of white paint.
 
Foolish, really.
 
Total mistake.
 
She’d never use it.
 
She’d never painted a room, let alone a house.
 
Up at the register, she asked Siggy if she knew of a good real-estate agent.

“My cousin, Linda.
 
She’d be only too happy to come look at your house, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
 
Siggy wrote out the phone number.
 
“I called one of the Crosby boys and he’ll be by to clean up that shed and the fallen timber.
 
Whether you stay or whether you go, all that wood lying about is a hazard.”

Emma made pancake batter when she got back to the house, adding the strawberries that had caused so much trouble.
 
Because Callie was still asleep, she telephoned her mother down in Florida.