The Ghost Orchid (30 page)

The movement of the carriage soon lulls Corinth to sleep, as well. She is instantly drawn by the scarlet thread back through the maze and down into the well, where Wanda is breathing her last breaths. The children who had gathered around Corinth have come closer now, but instead of waiting for a story, they are telling one—one only Wanda can hear. All Corinth can hear is the rattling of their bones, which sounds like china teacups shivering in their saucers.

Corinth startles awake to find that the carriage has stopped. Pale light filters through fogged-over windows. Alice is crouched on the floor below her, sorting through the clothes and toys packed in her trunk. Corinth wipes at the window with her handkerchief, but the fog is too thick to see through. She slides open the little window to the driver’s box and asks Tom why they’ve stopped.

“I’m just waiting for the fog to clear,” he says. “There’s a steep drop off the road up ahead that I don’t want to risk going over. Are you all right in there?”

“Yes,” Corinth tells him, looking down at Alice, who has pulled out of the trunk a doll with yellow hair and blue eyes. With a pang of remorse for Wanda, Corinth sees that it’s the same one that she had taken from Alice in the attic yesterday. The one Wanda had told her wasn’t for her. But it’s not the doll that Alice is interested in. She’s unwrapping something from a nest of white tissue paper. Corinth hears what it is before she sees it.

The dry rattle of bone against bone.

“Look, Wanda packed my teacup,” Alice says, holding up the cup and saucer. “See, you can tell it’s mine.” She tips the cup over so Corinth can see inside. Corinth leans forward. She feels as if she’s looking down into the white marble well again. At the bottom of the cup, in flowing blue script that bleeds into the white background, is written the name
Alice.

“See, that’s how I always knew which one was mine,” Alice says.

Corinth doesn’t say anything, picturing the row of flow-blue teacups in Aurora Latham’s china cabinet that she ordered specially from England
for the children.
Each with one of the children’s names on the inside.

“And Wanda told you to be careful always to drink only from your own cup.”

“Of course,” Alice says, laying the teacup down in its nest of tissue paper. “It would be dirty to share with the others. How long are we going to stay here?” she asks, climbing back up onto the seat. She kneels under the window and rubs it with the sleeve of her dress to see outside. The fog is burning off in the morning sun, dissolving into shreds. “I
know
where we are—the overlook on the way to the camp. Are we going to the camp, then?”

Corinth hesitates. Yes, this is the road to the camp, but how would Tom know the location of Latham’s hunting cabin? Had Latham taken him there? And why would Tom take them someplace that belonged to the Latham family? Is it possible he’s still acting for Milo—or for Aurora?

Alice is still staring at her, waiting for an answer. “Yes,” Corinth says, thinking it simpler to reassure the girl that they’re going someplace familiar.

Alice turns away from the window and smiles. “Oh, good, you’ll like it there,” she says. “I’ll show you the secret Indian grave in the bog.”

Corinth smiles back at the girl even though her flesh has gone cold. Alice can’t mean the desolate spot beneath the tamarack tree where she consigned that poor dead infant (Aurora’s child, not hers, she reminds herself) to the tea-colored water. She must have overheard one of Wanda’s stories about the Indian girls, abandoned by their lovers or repudiated by their tribes, who drowned themselves in the bog. The carriage jolts into motion and the wisps of fog stream away from the window. For a moment the two spots that Alice rubbed clean on the window darken into two black eyes and Corinth feels, rather than sees, someone watching from the side of the road.

Chapter Twenty-five

By the time we arrive at the turnoff to the camp, it has started to snow again. We drive through a stand of black spruce so dense it’s as if we are driving through a tunnel. Nat makes another right at an unmarked turnoff and then a left onto a drive whose only marking is the weathered blade of a canoe paddle nailed to the peeling bark of a birch tree.

“I’m guessing your family didn’t invite a lot of overnight guests to the camp,” I say, bracing myself as the car lurches on the unplowed road.

“Yeah, they saw remoteness as a virtue in location as well as emotional tone. It would have been even more remote before the valley was flooded in the thirties. Nothing but marshland and bog for a hundred miles in any direction. My grandfather said that back at the turn of the century an escaped convict hid out here all winter long. In the spring they found footsteps leading into the bog, but they never found his body. It was my grandfather’s belief that he’d been swallowed up by the bog and preserved in the peat.”

I wonder if this was another boogeyman Nat’s grandfather invented to scare him, but I don’t suggest it. Since Nat’s outburst on the cliff, we’ve both tried to stick to emotionally neutral content.

The narrow drive climbs up a small rise and then descends abruptly to the edge of a small pond. If you didn’t know the pond was there, you’d be in danger of driving straight into the water. Nat puts the car in park and turns off the engine. Instantly we are enveloped in a silence that feels as deep as the woods that surround us. Across the pond is the house—a low chalet built of rough-hewn logs, its roof and eaves sheathed in bark. It blends in so well with the surrounding woods I have the feeling that if I blinked, it would waver and be gone.

Nat sits looking at the house for a few minutes, as if more than a stretch of black water divided him from it—as if he were looking at the back of the last ferry as it pulls out of the dock. Then with one sharp expulsion of breath he gets out of the car and I follow him. Outside, the only sound is the soft whisper of snow falling through acres of black spruce.

“There’s a path that goes into the bog behind the house,” Nat says. “The grave site—or whatever it is—is about half a mile in. Stay close behind me, because there are sinkholes on either side of the path and we won’t be able to see them under the snow.”

I nod, feeling curiously unwilling to disturb the silence of these woods. As I follow Nat I can feel even through the layers of snow that the ground is buoyant and unstable.
A floating world,
my mother called it when she took me to visit a bog near our house in Lily Dale.

We had gone because my mother was looking for a love charm for one of her clients. Mira had described the orchid to me (“small white flowers growing on a tall spike with a scent like vanilla and cloves”) so that I could help find it. Usually I was reluctant to go on one of my mother’s foraging trips, but when I heard what she was looking for, I volunteered. I was just twelve, but I had begun to think about boys and to wonder what I might do to get them to think about me. The other girls in my school seemed equipped with an arsenal of attractions—lip glosses that made their lips shiny (unlike the waxy bee’s balm Mira gave me for chapped lips), and close-fitting jeans and T-shirts that disclosed their bodies instead of hiding them the way the shapeless linen shifts Mira made for me did. I suspected, as well, that these girls were getting advice from their mothers about boys that I would never get from Mira. Mira wouldn’t even talk about my father except to say that he was a boy she’d met at the agricultural college in Cobbleskill, where Mira had gone for one year, and who, when Mira got pregnant, hadn’t been interested in coming back to Lily Dale and starting a family. She’d moved back in with my grandmother, from whom she inherited the yellow Victorian house on the edge of town, her clientele of tourists who flocked each summer to Lily Dale to contact their dead relatives, and her bees, who were duly informed of Grandma Elly’s death so that they wouldn’t swarm. Sometimes I think it’s funny that Mira, whose calling is to recover lost loved ones or procure through charms and potions new loves, is so little interested in finding love herself. I picture a hollow place inside my mother where other people keep a place for a lover or husband that allows her to bring other women’s loved ones back from the dead. Like an empty seat at a table. Or the hollowness beneath a bog.

“In ancient times,” Mira told me while we looked for the white orchid, “bogs were recognized as sacred places consecrated to Mother Earth. Sacrifices were made to ensure fertility for the coming year. The bodies of sacrificial victims, along with fertility statues, are found today perfectly preserved.”

“That’s because of the tannic acid in the water,” I replied, repeating something I had recently learned in science class to still the quaking feeling in my stomach. I’d gotten my period for the first time the day before, but I hadn’t told Mira because I knew she’d make a huge fuss and probably burn some nauseating incense over my head and dance naked around me, or perform some equally embarrassing spectacle, when all I wanted was a box of Kotex and some Midol to stop the cramps. They weren’t so bad by the time we were walking in the bog, but I could feel a churning that made me queasily aware of my insides, and my stomach had the same spongy texture as the peat mat we walked over. Picturing preserved dead people beneath the sphagnum moss wasn’t helping.

Now, walking behind Nat on top of the snow-covered bog, I catch myself scanning the snowdrifts for the elusive white orchid my mother and I had gone looking for that day. What an odd juxtaposition, I realize now, that I went into the bog with my mother to gain some insight into love and instead heard about sacrificial victims preserved for all time in the peat. What I wanted to hear from my mother was that there was a possibility of finding a love that lasted, but instead I came away that day with an image of everlasting death seared into my brain.

“What’s so funny?” Nat asks, suddenly turning to face me. I didn’t even realize that I had laughed out loud.

“Oh, I was just remembering something I learned about bogs when I was young. My mother was interested in the bog people—”

“You mean
The Bog People
by Peter Glob? I love that book! My favorite bog person was the Tollund Man, the one with the little skullcap and the peaceful expression on his face, like an old guy sipping soup at Ratner’s Deli. But my favorite bog reference has to be Emily’s.”

“Emily’s?”

“Yes,” he says, placing his hand over his heart and striking the pose of an orator. “How dreary—to be—Somebody! / How public—like a Frog— / To tell one’s name—the livelong June— / To an admiring Bog!”

The heavy, leaden sky sends back an echo of the last word of the poem, a mocking reminder of the futility of shouting out one’s name in this place where the shadows of the black spruce trees seem to eat what little light remains of the day and the spongy ground swallows whatever falls into its maw. Nat runs his hand through his hair, dislodging a flurry of snowflakes, and laughs.

“You know,” he says, “when I first read that poem in college, I thought it was pretty disingenuous—the whole recluse-in-a-white-dress-shunning-publication thing. Who wouldn’t want to be published, after all? But the older I get, the more futile seems the idea that you can leave anything worthwhile of yourself behind, that it makes any difference. Sometimes I feel like Emily’s frog and that every word I write is just croaking in the graveyard.”

“The graveyard?” I repeat, suddenly feeling the same queasiness I had on that day I’d come to the bog with my mother.

“I’m sorry,” Nat says, noticing the stricken look on my face. “I guess that’s not the kind of thing an aspiring writer wants to hear. Remind me not to sign up for the Bosco mentoring program.” Nat stamps his feet against the ground. “And remind me not to give long lectures in the freezing cold. Come on, let’s find that tree.”

He turns around and continues into the woods and I follow, unable to explain that my reaction has nothing to do with my writing aspirations or hopes of publication. Instead, I’m remembering how I became increasingly nauseated that day in the bog, how every step seemed to be dragging me deeper into the bog’s maw. I was haunted by the idea that I was walking over the bones of those sacrificial victims my mother had told me about. No, not bones but whole bodies, tanned in the peat like leather purses.

As we descend into the sloping bowl at the center of the bog, I feel the same sinking feeling that I’ve felt since I lost my way in the snow at the overlook. Nat, though, lopes ahead, sure-footed, his gaze on the overhanging spruce boughs, his hands reaching out to graze the rough fringe of blue-green needles as if he were greeting old friends. I can imagine him tromping through these woods as a boy, playing Indian scout, looking for old Indian graves.

He stops at a tamarack that has fallen across the path, its yellow needles staining the new-fallen snow. It must have fallen in the last storm. Nat kneels to inspect the dark red bark, which is flaking off in patches.

“Could that be the tree?” I ask, disappointed to think that the tree we are looking for might have so recently succumbed to age. Looking around, I notice that many of the trees here slant at precarious angles, their roots straining for purchase in the soft soil. Dead trees litter the forest floor, half sunken into patches of frozen water. We’ve come to the heart of the bog, where the soil is thick enough to nurture tamarack and spruce saplings but too unstable to support the grown tree, which falls back into the ground to nurture more seedlings—a cycle of growth, premature birth, and decay that strikes me as cannibalistic—as if the bog were a devouring mother eating its own young. I only hope that
our tree
hasn’t been eaten by the bog.

“I think that’s it down there,” Nat says, pointing down the slope to a gnarled tamarack leaning precariously over the frozen water. I follow him down the steep incline, struggling to keep my footing in the snow. At the bottom I find Nat running his hands up and down the rough bark with the same intent look that Mira would get on her face when she did a palm reading.

“What are you looking for?” I ask.

“Shhhh,” Nat hisses, as if he were listening for a heartbeat in the tree. “I think the bark has grown over the name,” he says a moment later.

It seems quite possible. The tamarack’s bark is gnarled and twisted, as if it had chosen to grow inward rather than upward and so escape the fate of its brethren that litter the mossy floor of the bog. Even so, it’s pitched over the frozen water at an angle that suggests it might at any moment dive into the pond. Nat’s hands come to rest over a swollen node, and he begins to pick away at the flaky bark. Peering over his shoulder, I see appear beneath the reddish bark a patch of white that is as hard and shiny as bone. I gasp, as alarmed as if he’d really cut through living flesh to the bone. An image of a body trapped beneath the reddish bark,
buried alive
within the tree, flits through my mind, but when I reach past Nat to touch the white surface, I recognize that it’s only
bone china.
A tiny thread of blue flows along the edge of the bark like a vein. We’ve found the petrified heart of the tree.

Nat takes a penknife out of his back pocket and uses it to scrape away more bark. The blue vein reveals itself to be the curling loop at the end of a cursive letter. As I watch Nat’s blade uncover the letters, I have the odd sensation that he’s carving them as they appear. But of course that’s not the case. This name has lain here, buried beneath the tamarack bark, for a long, long time.

“ ‘To tell one’s name the livelong June,’ ” I say aloud.

Nat looks over his shoulder at me, his eyes shining. “Not to be forgotten,” he says. “They left this here so she wouldn’t be forgotten.”

He turns back and brushes away the shredded bark from the porcelain plaque. It’s round and slightly concave. Written in a flowing blue script is a single name.
Alice.

“I think it’s the bottom of a teacup,” I say, running my fingers over the smooth white porcelain surface. “If we could get it out, we might be able to see the manufacturer’s mark on the other side.”

I pry my fingers around the edges of the porcelain circle—it appears to have been wedged into a knothole that then grew over—but Nat lays his hand over mine.

“I don’t think we should remove it,” he says.

“Why not? I thought you wanted to know what happened.”

“Yes . . .” Nat falters, looking uncharacteristically unsure of himself. “. . . but it seems that someone went to a lot of trouble to leave this name here. I remember finding it when I was a kid and thinking it had been left here just for me. I used it in a story once—an amateurish thing that I wrote in college—about a boy finding a name carved on a tree in the woods behind his house, only it’s his own name and he thinks it means he’ll die under that tree.” Nat smiles sheepishly. “I called it ‘The Namesake.’ Eventually when the boy’s an old man he hikes into the woods and finds that the tree’s been struck by lightning and his name is rent in two. He has a heart attack and dies.” Nat grimaces. “My writing teacher, Spencer Leland, said it reminded him of one of Edith Wharton’s ghost stories . . .”

“I love Edith Wharton,” I say.

“Yeah, but Leland didn’t. It wasn’t meant as a compliment.” Nat strokes the porcelain. “I think I forgot that the real name on it was Alice because I changed it in my story. It’s like I wiped out her name to write my own, which, when you come to think of it, is all writing is.”

“I thought it was croaking in the graveyard,” I say. “Jeez, Nat, you’ve got more reasons not to write than any writer I’ve ever known.” As soon as the words are out I regret them. Who am I, after all, to criticize Nat Loomis’s ideas on writing? But Nat is laughing, big booming laughs that echo in the bowl of the bog. I can feel the reverberations in the spongy ground and see them in the tamarack’s shivering bark. Then I hear a loud groan and realize that the tree is careening forward—straight toward Nat. I grab his arm and pull him out of the way just before the tree hits the pond, shattering the thin scum of ice on its surface. We watch as the tree slowly sinks into the dark water.