Spirit Lost (24 page)

She spent the afternoon bringing in the groceries and preparing a small stockade of food for the attic. She brought a picnic basket filled with sandwiches and fruits, thermoses of hot coffee and tea, a flask of brandy for herself—just in case, she thought—and a tin of cookies left over from Christmas. John still slept. After rummaging around in her sewing room, she chose several small pieces of embroidery work to do in the attic. She could not bring the banner of seasons for the church up; it was too large and needed to be spread out on a table. But she had a baby blanket she wanted to finish for little Peter and a summer nightgown she was decorating for herself. She brought up two novels and the newspapers.

Still John slept. She sat in a brocade chair, embroidering while the afternoon faded away. She knew that if someone asked her now what she thought she was doing, she would have to answer that she didn’t know, she wasn’t even
thinking
about what she was doing. She was waiting. She was trying to be ready.

A little before five, she went down the stairs one more time. She had forgotten to bring up a tin of cat food for Aimee. She went to the front door, opened it wide, and just stood there awhile, letting the icy air blow over her. She stood there for the light, the remaining light, as if she could soak it in like a staying thing, as if she could stand there now and let the remaining light fall over her and close around her, providing her with a shield, a safeguard from the dark and whatever it might bring.

Orange Street was one of the main thoroughfares in Nantucket, a major one-way street running from the center of town to the airport and to roads leading to schools, residential sections, and shopping districts. Today it was strangely quiet, and no snowplows had come yet, so the street was sloppy with rutted snow. The wind was alive now, howling and whipping the snowflakes into frantic whirlwinds, and the heavy black cables enclosing telephone and electrical wires swung menacingly above the street.

The Constables had few neighbors now; most of the houses surrounding theirs were owned by people who lived elsewhere most of the year and opened their houses here only in the summer. So as Willy stood watching in the open doorway, she saw no warming glow in windows as people turned on lights in empty rooms, saw no familiar figures passing back and forth inside houses. The street was very quiet—except for the howling of the wind.

At last one person, so protected against the cold by winter garments that Willy could not tell if it was a man or woman, came past, head down, hurriedly stamping
through the snow. Willy was so glad to see this real live person with its bulky hooded coat that she wanted to call out a greeting. But of course she did not. And soon the person was out of sight, leaving Willy feeling even lonelier than before. Night and the storm were closing in.

What shall I do, Willy wondered, shall I tie some garlic around my neck or tape two pieces of kindling together to form a cross? No, that’s protection only against vampires, I think. She smiled at her thoughts, although she was shivering from the cold. Her teeth were chattering. But she was loath to close the front door and shut the house off from the rest of the world. When she did shut it, she did not draw the large brass bolt through as she did every other night. Tonight she was not afraid of anything human that might enter from the street.

The streetlights were on. The black night had come. Willy sighed and went up to the attic.

The door leading from the second-floor hall to the attic was shut and locked from the inside. Willy turned the handle, knocked on the door, pounded on the door, but it would not give.

She was shut out of the attic.

“John?” she called. “John?
Open the door, John
!”

There was no answer. She pressed her ear against the door and listened. She could hear nothing.

“John!” she called again. “Dammit, John, come on, open the goddamned door!”

It was a heavy wooden door with an old-fashioned metal latch; the lock on the other side was a black metal bolt drawn through a metal ring. No key would open this door.

Willy raced through the house, turning on every electric light she could as she passed, and frantically searched through the cupboards in the kitchen for the household tools. But it was as she feared: The tools were in the basement. Willy had always hated basements because of the odd mouse she had seen in basements as a child, because of old horror movies she had seen, and simply because she hated being underground in dank, shadowy places. She hesitated by the cellar door.

Then she unlocked it, opened it, and plunged downward. The overhead light switched on by a hanging chain and swung eerily back and forth as she clattered down the wooden stairs. Shadows streaked back and forth around her as she moved. She and
John had never been great as handymen, but they did own a tool chest, and she found it on an old table in the corner. She found the hammer. Nearly sobbing, she ran back up the stairs, leaving all the lights on.

“John!” she called when she was once again next to the attic door. “John, open this door or I’ll break it down! I mean it! This is crazy! Open the door!”

She waited, listening, and then began slamming at the door with the hammer.

It was surprising how little effect her blows had. She might as well have been chipping at marble with a nail file. At first only the paint gave, cracking, then breaking away, but finally, after her determined hammering, the old wood began to splinter. She aimed her blows near the latch when she realized that she would not be able to break the entire door down, and after what seemed an eternity of frantic pounding, she had created a large enough jagged gap for her to reach her hand through the wood and draw back the metal bolt that unlocked the door.

As she drew her hand back through the wooden hole, the splintered wood rasped along her hand, cutting her, but she didn’t care and hastily wiped the speckling streak of blood off on her sweater. She yanked the door open and raced up the stairs into the attic.

“God dammit, John!” she called as she climbed the stairs, “what do you mean by locking me out, this is my house as much as yours, you have no right—”

But John was asleep on the bed. The heaters were off, and the room was painfully cold. The only light that was on was the one Willy had automatically pulled on as she came up the stairs.

“John?” Willy asked hesitantly. She crossed the room and looked down at him. He was profoundly asleep. The cat stood on the end of the bed, her fur ruffled, her eyes wide.

“All right, then!” Willy said, turning and addressing the air, “all right!” She stomped around the attic, exaggerating her movement, the force and noise of her actions making her feel braver and stronger and bigger. She switched on the heaters and turned on every electric light.

“All right,” she said again, “go ahead and fight dirty. Fight as dirty as you can. I’ll fight dirty, too!” She walked back to the bed, looking around her as she walked. “I’ll tell John about you—all about you. I’ll bet he doesn’t know everything, I don’t think he read everything, I don’t think he turned the page, I don’t think he knows the truth about you! Why, you’re just pathetic!”

She knelt by her husband, and taking his shoulders in her hands, she shook him until at last he opened his eyes. It took him a few moments to focus, to see her, and then he said, so weakly she could scarcely hear him, “No, Willy.”

“Yes!”
Willy said. “You keep awake and you listen to me. John, I don’t think you know everything about this gorgeous ghost of yours. I don’t think you know that she needs you because she couldn’t keep her own husband. He left her—” Still holding on to John, Willy looked up at the attic, where nothing was visible, but the air seemed prickling with a presence. “He left you, didn’t he! Your husband left you for another woman! Ha!” Willy looked back down at John, whose head had fallen back and whose eyes were closed. “You listen to me!” she ordered. She propped him on pillows and rubbed and pulled at his face with her hands until he opened his eyes and looked at her.

“You didn’t read the entire account, John,” Willy said. “You didn’t turn the page. It’s true that when the
Parliament
returned, the officers told Jesse Orsa Wright that her husband had died at sea, but that wasn’t the truth, and they all knew it. Gradually the truth filtered up from the crew to the town and finally to Jesse Orsa herself: Her husband didn’t die at sea; he deserted the ship in order to stay on a Marquesan island, living with a brown-skinned, black-haired, illiterate island girl he had fallen in love with. He gave up command of his ship, he gave up his wealth, his entire way of civilized life, he gave up everything in order to live on an island with an island girl.
That’s
why she wants you, John. She couldn’t keep her own husband, and so she wants to steal mine.

“You’re pathetic!” Willy shouted, enraged, turning back to whatever hovered in the air near her. “No wonder you’re a ghost! If your husband had died at sea, your soul would be with his in death, but he was with another woman in life, and he’s with her now in death. You’re alone! You have no one, and so you want to steal
my
husband, and
I won’t let you
! Ha, what a pitiful little thing you must be; you couldn’t keep your own husband even after only a few months of marriage. Oh, John,” Willy said, turning back to her husband, “don’t you see?”

“It doesn’t matter,” John said, his voice a whisper. “That doesn’t matter, Willy. I’m hers. It’s done.”

“No, it’s not done!” Willy cried, but John’s eyes closed again, and he slumped in her arms.

She let him fall back against the pillows, let the bed take his entire weight.

“Sleep, then,” she said, “but I’m not leaving your side.” Willy rose and clenched
her fists and looked around her. “I’m not leaving him!” she yelled into the space of the attic. “You can’t have him!”

The wind was screaming now, and shafts of icy air spun through the attic. With three small pings, the electric heaters went off and all the lights went out.

“It’s all right,” Willy said, talking to herself, to whomever, whatever, might be listening, “I’m not afraid. You can’t frighten me. I can see from the window that the lights on Orange Street are out, too; they warned us when we moved here that the island often has power outages. I’m not afraid!”

Holding her sweater tightly around herself against the cold, Willy clattered down the two flights of stairs to the dining room, where she kept candles. She had many different lengths and colors of them, and she grabbed up a handful and two packets of matches and stuck them in her pocket. Then she lit a candle that stood in a silver candlestick on the dining room table, and, walking carefully now so she would not create a breeze that could cause the flame to flicker, she made her way more slowly back up to the attic. She was shaking all over, and she was so alert with each one of her senses that she was in a kind of vivid pain.

As she walked down the hall from the first-floor staircase to the second, she glanced at the doorway to her sewing room. Even though the room was plunged into total blackness, Willy could sense that something was different there, and shielding her candle with her hand, she entered a little ways into the room.

The sewing room was in a shambles. Yarns and needles and material and threads lay in twisted piles on the tables and chair and floor. Unwittingly making whimpering sounds, Willy stretched out her hand and carefully drew into the heart of the room, trying not to step on any of the fabric.

Her banner of seasons was half on the floor, half on the table. It had been ripped into shreds and tatters. Willy turned slowly, looking around her, the candle throwing eerie shadows on the walls. Everything she had done in this room had been destroyed.

“Oh, God,” Willy cried. “Oh, no.” For now she had no doubts about the existence of the ghost. And now she feared its power.

She hurriedly left the room, once again, shielding the candle with her hand. She climbed the attic stairs, feeling her heart swell with terror as she went farther up into the ghostly cold domain. Tears ran down her face, and she carelessly wiped away at them with the back of her hand.

Aimee was still at the foot of John’s bed, making small growling noises in her throat. Willy crossed the attic and sank down on to the bed at her husband’s side. She could see by the candlelight that he was still sleeping. She touched his forehead. It was very cold.

“You wretched, pitiful bitch,” Willy said aloud. “You can’t have him.”

I will sit here all night, she thought, I will sit here in the dark, I will sit here without leaving his side again, I will sit here if all the candles blow out, burn out, I’ll listen to the wind howl, but I will not leave his side, I will not leave him to her.

But then she did leave his side, for just a moment, to fetch the flask of brandy from the table. She sat down next to John then and sipped the brandy, which burned her pleasantly. The cat moved next to her and settled down against her, not sleeping, very alert.

So Willy began to wait. In her mind it was the dawn that would save them; in her thoughts she had only to wait until the light came. She thought that as long as she was at John’s side, the ghost could not come to him, could not take him.

But after a while a new fear came to her, a terrifying new thought, and she cursed herself for her stupidity, for her dull-wittedness.

The ghost was taking him now. How could she not have guessed? The ghost was taking him now, even as Willy sat by his side.

How incredibly stupid she had been, Willy thought. John was not sleeping. He was dying.

Willy took his hands in hers and sat there for a moment, just holding her husband’s hands, which were so cold. This is a poisonous trade the ghost is making, Willy thought; she is taking my husband and leaving me with her burden of grief and jealousy and bitter despair.

“Oh, God, help me!” Willy called aloud.

She threw back the covers and lay down next to her husband, pulling his body against hers. He lolled next to her, as limp as a doll. She chafed at his hands and arms and face, trying to rub warmth into them. She put her head on his chest. His heart was still beating; it was racing. But his body was chilling, and his breath was shallow, and now she could not get him to come awake.