into it? That another boy, perhaps the incestuous child of Son and Sara Tidwell, had been drowned by his mother in the lake, she maybe laughing that smoke-broken, lunatic laugh as she held him down? You gotta wiggle when you wobble, honey, and hold that young ‘un way down deep.
‘If you need me to apologize, Mike, consider it done.’
‘I don’t. Frank, do you remember anything else she might have said that night? Anything at all?’
‘She said she knew how you found the house.’
‘She said what?’
‘She said that when it wanted you, it called you.’
At first I couldn’t reply, because Frank Arlen had completely demolished one of the assumptions I’d made about my married life — one of the biggies, one of those that seem so basic you don’t even think about questioning them. Gravity holds you down. Light allows you to see. The compass needle points north. Stuff like that.
This assumption was that Jo was the one who had wanted to buy Sara Laughs back when we saw the first real money from my writing career, because Jo was the ‘house person’ in our marriage, just as I was the ‘car person.’ Jo was the one who had picked our apartments when apartments were all we could afford, Jo who hung a picture here and asked me to put up a shelf there. Jo was the one who had fallen in love with the Derry house and had finally worn down my resistance to the idea that it was too big, too busy, and too broken to take on. Jo had been the nest-builder.
She said that when it wanted you, it called you.
And it was probably true. No, I could do better than that, if I was willing to set aside the lazy thinking and selective remembering. It was certainly true. I was the one who had first broached the idea of a place in western Maine. I was the one who collected stacks of real-estate brochures and hauled them home. I’d started buying regional magazines like Down East and always began at the back, where the real-estate ads were. It was I who had first seen a picture of Sara Laughs in a glossy handout called Maine Retreats, and it was I who had made the call first to the agent named in the ad, and then to Marie Hingerman after badgering Marie’s name out of the Realtor.
Johanna had also been charmed by Sara Laughs — I think anyone would have been charmed by it, seeing it for the first time in autumn sunshine with the trees blazing all around it and drifts of colored leaves blowing up The Street — but it was I who had actively sought the place out.
Except that was more lazy thinking and selective remembering. Wasn’t it? Sara had sought me out.
Then how could I not have known it until now? And how was I led here in the first place, full of unknowing happy ignorance?
The answer to both questions was the same. It was also the answer to the question of how Jo could have discovered something distressing about the house, the lake, maybe the whole TR, and then gotten away with not telling me. I’d been gone, that’s all. I’d been zoning, tranced out, writing one of my stupid little books. I’d been hypnotized by the fantasies going on in my head, and a hypnotized man is easy to lead.
‘Mike? Are you still there?’
‘I’m here, Frank. But I’ll be goddamned if I know what could have scared her so.’
‘She mentioned one other name I remember: Royce Merrill. She said he was the one who remembered the most, because he was so old. And she said, “I don’t want Mike to talk to him. I’m afraid that old man might let the cat out of the bag and tell him more than he should know.” Any idea what she meant?’
‘Well . . . it’s been suggested that a splinter from the old family tree wound up here, but my mother’s people are from Memphis. The Noonans are from Maine, but not from this part.’ Yet I no longer entirely believed this.
‘Mike, you sound almost sick.’
‘I’m okay. Better than I was, actually.’
‘And you understand why I didn’t tell you any of this until now? I mean, if I’d known the ideas you were getting . . . if I’d had any clue . . . ‘
‘I think I understand. The ideas didn’t belong in my head to begin with, but once that shit starts to creep in . . . ‘
‘When I got back to Sanford that night and it was over, I guess I thought it was just more of Jo’s
“Oh fuck, there’s a shadow on the moon, nobody go out until tomorrow.” She was always the superstitious one, you know — knocking on wood, tossing a pinch of salt over her shoulder if she spilled some, those four-leaf-clover earrings she used to have . . . ‘
‘Or the way she wouldn’t wear a pullover if she put it on backward by mistake,’ I said. ‘She claimed doing that would turn around your whole day.’
‘Well? Doesn’t it?’ Frank asked, and I could hear a little smile in his voice.
All at once I remembered Jo completely, right down to the small gold flecks in her left eye, and wanted nobody else. Nobody else would do.
‘She thought there was something bad about the house,’ Frank said. ‘That much I do know.’
I drew a piece of paper to me and jotted Kia on it. ‘Yes. And by then she may have suspected she was pregnant. She might have been afraid of . . . influences.’ There were influences here, all right.
‘You think she got most of this from Royce Merrill?’
‘No, that was just a name she mentioned. She probably talked to dozens of people. Do you know a guy named Kloster? Gloster? Something like that?’
‘Skuster,’ I said. Below Kia my pencil was making a series of fat loops that might have been cursive letter l’s or hair ribbons. ‘Kenny Auster. Was that it?’
‘It sounds right. In any case, you know how she was once she really got going on a thing.’
Yes. Like a terrier after rats.
‘Mike? Should I come up there?’
No. Now I was sure. Not Harold Oblowski, not Frank, either. There was a process going on in Sara, something as delicate and as organic as rising bread in a warm room. Frank might interrupt that process . . . or be hurt by it.
‘No, I just wanted to get it cleared up. Besides, I’m writing. It’s hard for me to have people around when I’m writing.’
‘Will you call if I can help?’
‘You bet,’ I said.
I hung up the telephone, thumbed through the book, and found a listing for R. MERRILL on the Deep Bay Road. I called the number, listened to it ring a dozen times, then hung up. No newfangled answering machine for Royce. I wondered idly where he was. Ninety-five seemed a little too old to go dancing at the Country Barn in Harrison, especially on a close night like this one.
I looked at the paper with Kia written on it. Below the fat l-shapes I wrote Kyra, and remembered how, the first time I’d heard Ki say her name, I’d thought it was ‘Kia’ she was saying.
Below Kyra I wrote Kito, hesitated, then wrote Carla. I put these names in a box. Beside them I jotted Johanna, Bridget, and Jared. The fridgeafator people. Folks who wanted me to go down nineteen and go down ninety-two.
‘Go down, Moses, you bound for the Promised Land,’ I told the empty house. I looked around.
Just me and Bunter and the waggy clock . . . except it wasn’t.
When it wanted you, it called you.
I got up to get another beer. The fruits and vegetables were in a circle again. In the middle, the letters now spelled:
lye stille
As on some old tombstones — God grant she lye stille. I looked at these letters for a long time.
Then I remembered the IBM was still out on the deck. I brought it in, plonked it on the dining-room table, and began to work on my current stupid little book. Fifteen minutes and I was lost, only faintly aware of thunder someplace over the lake, only faintly aware of Bunter’s bell shivering from time to time. When I went back to the fridge an hour or so later for another beer and saw that the words in the circle now said
ony lye stille
I hardly noticed. At that moment I didn’t care if they lay stille or danced the hucklebuck by the light of the silvery moon. John Shackleford had begun to remember his past, and the child whose only friend he, John, had been. Little neglected Ray Garraty.