The Book of Speculation (9 page)

S— Some info on your names. What’s with the paywall on this stuff? Should I be concerned you’re looking into dead women? P.S. My dad called. Gutter’s falling off your place. Let’s get you drunk. Pick me up at 8:00. —A

I sandwich the papers between the books and leave. Walking out the door feels almost like swimming, and I barely recognize the wire lawn sculpture I’ve hated since it appeared five years ago. I toss the stolen books onto the passenger seat along with Peabody’s. I have two weeks to give Janice, but I won’t go back. In my family we don’t prolong goodbyes.

I speed the entire drive home. When the car bottoms out on the dip by the harbor I laugh.

The reality of how close the house is to the cliff sinks in when I pull into the driveway. Instead of sitting down with Alice’s printouts or cleaning up for a night out at the Oaks, I attack the roof.

I hammer and wrestle the twisted metal back into the semblance of a working gutter. The brackets and screws are still attached, as though the roof itself shifted. An hour’s worth of hammering and bending and shredding my hands, and the gutter is ready to be reattached to the eave. The wood splinters under the first screw. I adjust, try again, but it gives way once more, sending a chunk careening to the ground. Third and fourth attempts only loosen shingles and further disintegrate the eave. The gutter falls, beginning an outline around a soon-to-be-dead house. The roof is rotting. This is something I should have known to fix years ago, should have known needed maintaining, but no one told me. I was left a house and a sister, with no instructions on either. And the cliff creeps closer.

We used to run down it, Enola and I, feet sinking deep. Her hand in mine, we pulled each other to the shore, gape-mouthed and howling. Each leap had us falling, counting seconds before we touched ground. Knees bent we’d land, the earth catching us and giving way, sliding down to the sea. Each step chewed at the houses around us, mine.

I would take every one of those steps back.

I let the gutter lie. Hop over it to go up the step, tug the damned door that never opens. Into the living room. Pick up the phone. Call Alice.

“It’s me.”

“You skipped out,” she says. It’s hard to tell how she feels about that.

“I’m sorry,” I say, to be safe. “Do you mind if I come by early? Is that okay? I can’t be here right now.”

6

It had been long years since the house in Krommeskill had known a baby. It was a place of clouds, hidden in the Hudson’s haze and ruled by the strict and righteous hand of Sarah Visser—Grandmother Visser.

The trouble with Evangeline started long before Amos saw her in a lightning field. The trouble was that she’d been born.

“Naught is right with you,” Grandmother Visser said upon examining Evangeline. “But I shall fix you.” Her heavy cheeks shook. The baby was peculiar. She stared at those who held her from eyes like her father’s, a strange man who’d tapped at her mother’s window on nights when mist came off the river. Eyes colored like copper and dead dandelions, eyes in which Grandmother Visser saw her daughter’s fall from grace.

Amelia Visser, the child’s mother, was sixteen when the man visited her window. He breathed otherness, and a secret light burned inside him, spilling out when he spoke. His skin had a faint yellow hue like brass or gold, his hair was sooty black, his features were both boy and man, and infinitely interesting to Amelia.

The rapping sound had been gentle. Amelia drew back the curtain on those eyes the color of weathered metal. She opened the window.

His voice, a warm humming. “I’ve seen you at the river. May I watch you swim on the morrow?” Softness can compel, a voice can mesmerize, as did this man’s quiet lilt.

Amelia felt him when she swam—in the tall grass and shadows of the woods, in the water itself because it tickled and made her skin come alive. Upon returning from the river Amelia discovered a strange shell left on her windowsill, a gift from the man. Smooth and hard with a sharp tail and spiny legs that ended in claws she dared not touch. She caressed the shell’s fragile dome. It was curved and shaped like a horse’s shoe. She left her window open with the drapes thrown wide. When her mother asked her why, Amelia answered, “For the brass-skinned man with the copper eyes,” and had the backs of her hands switched for fibbing.

A kiss on the cheek was followed by a kiss on the lips, until what was wild in the man bled into Amelia. Her eyes became feral, her laughter uncontrolled, and her temper impossible. Her belly grew full.

Her mother nailed the window shut.

In months a sharp pain grew in Amelia’s stomach. With the pain came blood. With blood came fear, with fear came loneliness—from loneliness came a most remarkable thing: a daughter.

When Evangeline suckled she drew life from her mother along with the milk, growing fat and round while Amelia wasted. She became drawn, waxen, and cried tears enough to wash the linens. She rose from her bed only once a day and would not let the baby from her side. In Evangeline’s eyes Amelia saw the man who had visited her until summer had burned into fall.

Though Amelia withered from pining, Grandmother Visser saw only the price of sin and her negligence. She saw the face of a seducing man smiling out of a child and swore to teach the sin from Evangeline, to raise her better than she had her daughter. While Amelia lay dying and Evangeline’s eyes were closed like a new chick, Grandmother Visser took the baby.

“I will wash you of the stain,” she said, her voice clipped by abrupt Dutch English. Her broad bosom was covered by the stiff black wool of mourning—the modest attire she’d chosen to wear since the long-ago death of her husband, Johannes Visser, a good and righteous man. The cloth chafed Evangeline’s skin, but she slept on until shocked by frigid washtub water.

“I myself shall baptize you.”

Evangeline cried, but was silenced by wash water. Grandmother Visser held the infant’s head and murmured prayers, rocking. With each verse she pushed Evangeline’s head further below the murky surface.

“We repent our sins and fear new sin’s approach, we clean ourselves in grace’s water.”

She pried Evangeline’s mouth open with a finger, for the root of sin dwelled in the heart and the belly. Water flooded in—enough to drown.

“We are nothing save what grace allows us, vessels to be filled in the holy river.”

The baby began to drink, swallowing as if to breathe, then closed her lips around her grandmother’s finger and began to suckle. It was the suckling that touched Grandmother Visser, making her remember how she’d once loved holding Amelia to her breast. She lifted the child from the water.

Evangeline smiled around her grandmother’s finger, unaware she’d survived drowning.

On her deathbed Amelia shone with sweat, hair stuck to her skin, framing her in darkness. To Sarah Visser, her daughter glowed like angels.

“I will raise the girl as if she were my own flesh,” she promised. Then Amelia was gone.

*   *   *

Sarah Visser read to Evangeline from a tattered Bible, sang hymns to her, and ensured the first names the girl knew were the Apostles. Days began with prayer before sunrise, followed by tending to the hens and goats, hours in the kitchen learning to cook like a proper Dutch wife, prayer, laundering, cleaning, and spinning. Each day was constructed so that there could be no rest, only devotion and the tasks of a righteous woman.

Grandmother Visser loved Evangeline; though she feared the sin that made the girl, the willful part of her soul praised God for the chance to begin anew.

Evangeline grew from a biddable child into a young woman with a face like a cat, eyes large like dinner plates, and black hair that tumbled to her knees. Despite Grandmother Visser’s vigilance, the river called, begging her to run and dive into its waters.

To keep her from running, Grandmother Visser took Evangeline’s shoes and extended prayers until the candles burned out. Evangeline would lay abed until her grandmother left, then climb out the window, drop to the ground, and breathe in the night. She’d run through the garden, uncaring if stones scraped her feet. She’d run to the water, until its cold slickness greeted her and the restlessness that clawed her let down. She did not know her mother had walked these steps to meet her father.

Grandmother Visser discovered Evangeline’s bloodied feet and remembered Amelia as if she’d died just days before. She began to lace Evangeline in stays so tight she could not breathe well enough to run.

“Good women do not run; they take measured steps, for sin lies in carelessness.” She pulled the laces until the boning became a prison.

Evangeline tore them open with a letter opener, her lungs spreading wider with the snap of each cord. Then she fled to the river. No matter the way it flowed, if she followed, the water would take her away.

Evangeline’s meetings with Will Aben spurred change in her heart. Will, the miller’s son, said that Evangeline’s mother had taken up with a traveler who’d stolen her soul. Will’s father had told him that once the man departed, her mother had grown so thin she’d vanished into the bedsheets and had blown away like dust.

Evangeline did not believe someone might die of heartache.

She was sixteen when they began to speak. Will was a young man of seventeen, strong in back, with hair so light it appeared colorless, and a charming smile despite a broken tooth. Evangeline sought Will to speak of things other than staving off sin and what Good Women did. Will, too, snuck away. Fascinated by the Visser girl and her wild eyes, he left the mill house to meet her, but he was not so practiced at stealth as Evangeline.

In late spring Dora Aben woke to the squeal of the mill gate opening. She watched from a window as Will walked to the river to meet the Visser girl. Still in her night rail, covered by a heavy dressing gown, she left the house. Once faced with his mother’s ire, Will fled. Dora Aben took Evangeline’s hand, grabbed a fistful of her hair, and dragged her to the Visser house. Dora pounded until the door opened, then promptly informed Sarah Visser that her granddaughter was a slattern set on seducing her son.

Grandmother Visser paid no mind to Evangeline’s pleas, or that she’d long disliked Dora Aben and thought her prone to idleness and blasphemy. What she saw standing in the doorway was that despite the years she’d spent loving Evangeline, teaching, and correcting her sins, the girl’s belly would grow as round as Amelia’s had. She grabbed Evangeline’s hair from Dora Aben’s clenched fingers.

Sarah pulled her granddaughter into the kitchen, bent her across the farm table, and held her down by pressing her full weight onto Evangeline’s back. Then she reached for the spoon. Sarah’s hands bore scars from where her own mother had smacked her knuckles with a long-handled cooking spoon each time she’d dropped an egg, showed willfulness or a slovenly nature. She’d been lenient with Amelia, so much so that it had cost her her life. As Evangeline kicked beneath her, Grandmother Visser grabbed the heavy spoon from where it hung on the wall, waiting to again meet flesh in anger.

“Deliver me from the will of the flesh.” Her arm swung back, a tight-drawn string, and with a snap descended.

Spoon hit skin and Evangeline writhed. Redness rose, raw and stinging. Welts blossomed as she was smacked for the river, smacked for Will Aben, smacked for her mother and the father she’d never known. Smacked for the pine needles stuck in her hair. Smacked for the dirt under her nails. Smacked for her bloodied feet.

Struggling to cover her face, Evangeline did not see her grandmother’s tears, her sadness, or her fear.

Smacked for each broken lace. Smacked for scaring the hens so they wouldn’t lay. Smacked for crawling out the window. Smacked for being unclean. Each blow ended with begging the Lord’s forgiveness for lacking the strength to hone the girl into the steel that makes a faithful woman.

Sarah Visser was tired from the loss of her husband, her daughter, and from raising and loving a wanton child. While Evangeline had grown, Sarah had decayed. Her hair had grayed, her braid loops as thin as rats’ tails, her face had widened, and her fire was doused under fat and wrinkles. Her arm grew weak, her breathing ragged.

Evangeline’s hand flew out. Burning and wild, she wrenched the spoon from her grandmother. Force moved within her, filling her mouth with the taste of wash water. The spoon felt solid in her hand, as though part of her. She pushed the old woman forward, knocked her feet from under her, and drove Grandmother Visser to the floor they’d scrubbed and swept that morning. Evangeline’s arm lifted. The implement struck down so strong, so quick, she could not believe that she had done it. And then she could not stop.

Grandmother Visser wailed. The spoon smacked her mouth. Evangeline’s arm flew, whipping again and again as if driven by holy fire.

She did not hear her grandmother beg, “Stop, stop, precious thing, please.”

Evangeline’s body rang, each sinew and joint remembering blackened knees from kneeling, bruised ribs from tightened stays, and the pain of being kept from the river.

The spoon buzzed and hummed, singing, calling for her to let loose the wild. A sickening thump sounded as a blow struck her grandmother’s throat.

Grandmother Visser’s eyes snapped open like a startled rabbit. The spoon dropped. Evangeline’s grandmother’s face reddened, tears pouring from it like a split cook pot. Panic awoke. Evangeline backed away from where her grandmother gasped for breath that would not come.

Grandmother Visser’s belly rose and fell in spasms, and her face turned a deeper crimson. She stared at Evangeline, awed.

Evangeline struggled to sit her up. Apologies spouted from her with the same fervor that her grandmother had for prayer. Her grandmother tugged on Evangeline’s arm until their knotted bodies came to rest against the woodstove. She rasped and wheezed. Evangeline patted her cheeks and begged her to breathe. Grandmother Visser’s head lolled to the side. A lank braid fell across her chest.

Cradling her grandmother’s shoulders, Evangeline began to rock.

Sarah Visser took her granddaughter’s hand.