As Clarissa fanned herself with an empty file folder marked “Story Ideas,” a realization forced itself on her with the same shame-mongering vigor as those spousal death scenarios. Maybe her death fantasies had nothing to do with her writer’s block. Rather, was the block a symptom of her wanting not to succeed? Or to put a finer point on her mind’s restless pencil, if she faltered, would she be doing her husband, and therefore their marriage, a favor?
She spun her chair away from the window. The fly flew to the desk and lit on the tab of a very fat manila folder that was tucked under a stack of half-baked novel attempts (Clarissa printed everything out). The tab, which was the only visible part of the folder, was labeled in black Sharpie “House History Dossier.”
“Fuuuuuck, I’m finished,” Clarissa said to the room, not knowing exactly what she meant yet understanding it was true. She stamped her foot three times—a tiny tantrum disturbing the heavy air—and no sooner had the ball of her foot tapped thrice than Olga Villada, a woman who had been dead since 1826, brushed a cobweb out of her way and entered the studio through Clarissa’s south-facing wall.
Olga Villada was a handsome woman, and if Clarissa had bothered to look through the dossier, she would have known that. Shortly after she bought the property, she’d traveled to the state archives in Tallahassee and paid for duplicates of everything they had in their files about the house; but she’d been so busy staring, dumb-faced, into her blank computer screen that she’d not gotten around to reading through the inch-thick stack of photocopies. The Realtor had told her the house had been built by a woman, but how much stock could you put into what a Realtor said?
If she had simply flipped open the file, she would have seen—because the librarian had put it on top, a frontispiece, as it were—a copy of an engraving rendered by an anonymous artist who’d cast Olga Villada as a young woman of modest height, abundant bosomry, and corkscrew curls that seemed inspired more by the area’s ubiquitous Spanish moss than reality. In the illustration, she stood beneath a large, canopied live oak, holding a bullwhip in one hand and a map in the other. She did not appear to want to indulge the artist—no smile, no precious posing. Rather, her raised eyebrow, direct gaze, and pursed lips would have led Clarissa to believe that Olga Villada had been a busy woman with better things to do than stand still while somebody drew her likeness.
In all honesty, the artist had captured Olga Villada’s beautiful curls with fair accuracy. But she was prettier than in the engraving. This was possibly because Olga Villada, having been the daughter of one of Spain’s most beloved and successful flamenco guitarists, Federico García Villada, moved even in death with a dancer’s rhythm and grace.
She glided across the room, her booted feet echoing against the heart pine floor, but it was a sound only she and the fly heard. The onetime mistress of the Spanish governor of Florida, Olga Villada knew about emotionally unavailable men and broken hearts. She also knew about good men, which was one of the reasons—other than Clarissa being the only person who ever lived in the house capable of telling her story—that she had taken a personal interest in the young woman. Life was too short, the ghost knew, for a woman to waste it on a man who did not know how to love.
Olga Villada was entering dangerous territory. Prodding Clarissa into writing their story and inspiring in her the will to mend her passionless marriage violated the family’s number one dictum: Do not interfere with the living; no funny business, no helping out, no causing harm. Olga Villada noticed how Clarissa sat hunched over her computer, staring hopelessly at its black screen, and how she clenched and unclenched her fists as if preparing for a fight that never came, and how unkempt she was: hair stringy, complexion sallow. The poor thing was a wreck, in need of the kind of encouragement only a woman as seasoned and wise as Olga Villada could provide. She would simply have to tread lightly—no direct intervention, just some mild jabs to get her started. No one would have to know. Olga Villada moved aside Clarissa’s long curls and began, with a mother’s tenderness, to massage her neck.
Clarissa, unaware that there was a ghost in the room, closed her eyes, sat very still, and tried to will her womanhood back, sensing that if she was successful, the world—and therefore her novel and maybe even her husband—would open up to her again. Her soul’s numbness, her heart’s unease, her mind’s white noise: It would all be replaced by a new and vigorous awareness that either would allow her to care not one whit about what was going on out there in her garden or would give her the tools she needed to do something about it; and either way, this changed perspective would reopen her creative vein. This was what she told herself.
But nothing came to her. Nothing. Even her ovarian shadow women sat silent, unseeing, unhearing, like those horrible little know-no-evil monkeys for sale in import stores. But at least some of the tension in her shoulders and neck was easing.
Olga Villada, seeing that the fly was sipping Clarissa’s tea, whipped out her fan (she was a very sexy woman) and shooed it away.
Clarissa opened her eyes and reached for her cup, not knowing that the fatigued little fly had indulged. She could not write under this pressure, under these circumstances, with her husband out there cavorting. Again. And it wasn’t so much the cavorting or the painting and drawing or even all the nakedness. More than anything, she struggled with the reality that her husband was consumed with the joy of being with other women—naked women, all confident and booby and young—to the total exclusion of herself. He was chattering, laughing, whispering, and saying, “Yes, yes”—all sounds he’d stopped sharing with her years ago.
My, oh my, how she wanted him dead! She drank her tea (Olga Villada rifled through her desk), and as the sweet, cream-heavy liquid coated her tongue, the present moment dissolved into a rerun of episode six: Michael Douglas and the Voodoo Dude, based on a movie she’d seen ages ago.
Although the real title forever eluded her, the plot—adjusted to suit her needs—never did. Douglas’s sweet, good-natured wife died while using an electric mixer, because unbeknownst to her, the dishwasher had sprung a leak and there was something about standing in water while using an electrical device that could kill a person. With her out of the way, the evil voodoo priest spent the rest of the film seriously screwing with the dead woman’s hapless husband.
In Clarissa’s revisioned film, she was the doting wife who was busy cleaning the face of their cherubic little boy while the family dog jumped and barked and wagged his tail. Iggy was trying to fix the dishwasher. He was impatient and, of course, careless. While the water rose up his pant leg—the rising level determined by the voodoo priest posing as a gardener—he touched a live wire. The rest was history. Clarissa—mother, wife, and brownie maker—heard the electric hiss and immediately hid her son’s face in the soft folds of her skirt. Iggy let out a surprised, anguished, voltage-filled yelp and then fell flat over, big blue eyes wide open, giant hand seared to the—zzzzzzz!—sparking wire.
Quick as that, Clarissa was a widow, and even as she stood there, her son in her arms, his face hidden from the tragedy while she wept a widow’s tears, she knew that she and her son would go on, that somehow they would find a way to live abundant lives without Daddy. The voodoo priest would prove to be no match for maternal love. Cue the sappy, heart-lifting music.
Clarissa shook her head, releasing the fantasy. The words You do not really want to kill your husband floated through her brain. The bimbo models and Iggy were chatting. Clarissa refused to look. She reached for the remote control, turned on the TV, and scrolled through the channels until she found CNN. Olga Villada, immediately taken with this glowing box and its talking heads, walked over to the TV, her long skirt swishing, and pressed her face against the screen. The picture bounced, sputtered, faded, and bloomed into snow. Olga Villada jumped back and moved to a safer distance, next to the desk.
“Stupid cable!” Clarissa said, turning the TV off and then on again, just in time to catch a report from Stonehenge. Several thousand pagans and other assor
ted revelers had descended on the ancient site, braving cold temperatures and intermittent rain, to celebrate the solstice.
“The clouds broke right at dawn, man, and there was music and singing and dancing. It was awesome,” said a bearded guy with a Southern California accent and dilated pupils. His nose and cheekbones were painted in yellow and green stripes. He wore shorts and what appeared to be an animal skin.
Weirdo American, thought Clarissa, you’re embarrassing all of us. Freaking caveman wannabe.
Olga Villada thought he looked quite fetching, a warrior. She imagined herself in his arms, her locks flowing across his chest. But she stopped there. She was in love, after all.
“On a more serious note,” said the anchorwoman, who looked just like the reporter from the previous story but was not. “According to the Defense Department, a disturbing milestone has been reached in the Iraq war. Twenty-five hundred American troops have now died in action.”
They rolled a clip of Tony Snow, the president’s press secretary, skipping not one guilty beat as he replied to a reporter who asked if the president had any reaction to the new figure, “It’s a number, and every time there’s one of these five hundred benchmarks, people want something.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” Clarissa said, not believing her ears. Just a number! How about just twenty-five hundred souls. Just children. Just husbands. Just sons. Just daughters. How dared he! The whole world, from Stonehenge to Iraq to Washington to her rose garden, was unraveling, perilous thread by perilous thread. Just a number!
The anchor said, “Democrats on the Hill are not happy and are threatening to withhold future funding and are pushing for a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. Today, the junior senator from Illinois, Senator Barack Obama, delivered a stinging indictment from the Senate floor.”
They ran a video of a handsome young African American man, looking fine in his suit and tie. “As one who strongly opposed the decision to go to war,” he said, his eyes reflecting, Clarissa thought, a determination and clarity she was unaccustomed to, “and who has met with servicemen and -women injured in this conflict and seen the pain of the parents and loved ones of those who have died in Iraq, I would like nothing more than for our military involvement to end.”
“Barack Obama, Barack Obama.” Clarissa liked this guy and wanted to remember his crazy-assed name. She switched channels. MSNBC was covering the president’s G-8 meeting in Vienna—nothing more than a photo op. The reporter said no one knew if Bush had been briefed on the updated death toll—that’s right, the entire country knows, but not the president. Great; now ignorance is his number one defense.
Disgusted, she punched the mute button but couldn’t pull herself away from the image that flashed across the screen. A woman who appeared to be in her early to midfifties, her face tear-streaked, was handcuffed and flanked by police. The caption revealed that she had attempted to jump off the 110-story Sears Tower to protest the Iraq war. Briefly, before returning to the footage of the woman being shuttled out by far more law enforcement than seemed necessary, they showed stock footage of the skyscraper, its top floors obscured by clouds. Clarissa could not help but think back to the horror of 9/11 and the people who had chosen to jump to certain death and how their reflections must have flickered against the glass—human birds plummeting to earth. Why, Clarissa wondered, would someone believe that leaping from the Sears Tower would help stop the war? And how did it feel to fall through the sky? Did God render mercy, filling their minds with blind grace? Or were they on their own, their only company fear and a change of heart? Clarissa couldn’t take any more. She turned off the TV, but her brain kept going: Do you have to bend your knees to leap or do you just fall forward, rigid and bright? She closed her eyes and imagined herself on the Sears Tower roof, among the clouds.
Noticing that the House History Dossier file was buried beneath a stack of manuscripts, Olga Villada decided that this was her chance to exert a little direct action. While Clarissa rested her eyes, Olga Villada quickly fished the dossier out of the pile and placed it on top.
A door slammed. She and Clarissa glanced out the window. Iggy was alone, flipping through his sketchpad.
Clarissa leaned forward and peered past the rose garden. The models were nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they’re in my house, defiling my toilet, Clarissa thought. She closed the blinds.
Olga Villada nodded her approval; she was not a woman who suffered fools.
Perhaps, Clarissa mused, Jane had been on to something with her sophomoric questions. Maybe she should try writing in longhand. Maybe the act of actually putting pen to paper would thaw her frozen brain. She searched the cluttered desk for a pen, looking under magazines, manuscripts, empty and overstuffed files, a spine-broken and dog-eared copy of Aleixandre’s Destruction or Love, the House History Dossier folder. Funny, she did not remember it being on top of the stack. Hadn’t it been buried for weeks under the manuscript pile? When had she pulled it out? Holy moly, more evidence that she was going mad. Or there was always the possibility that her desk was such a mess—a helter-skelter mass of papers, files, and missing books—that nothing was really visible. She looked at her computer and then the folder.
Olga Villada considered moving the file a hair closer and then thought better of it. She wanted her to read the material, not be so frightened that she stopped coming into the studio.
Clarissa fingered the bottom edge of the file. Maybe, she pondered, if she read up on the house’s history, she’d feel more at home, more like the place was hers, no matter that her husband went behind her back, rearranging everything she touched. Take the time to read this; do something nice for yourself, she thought. What’s one more day without writing going to cost? Five months and twenty-nine days?
She grabbed the folder. She could spend the rest of the morning in her library, laid out on her fainting couch, reading. What a nice idea. Besides, now was her chance: The naked models were disposed, somewhere. And if she ran into them inside the house, she held the power; a clothed woman in her own home trumped naked bimbos in search of the bathroom any day. Folder and teacup in hand, feeling uncharacteristically courageous, she hurried out the door.
The fly rode the wake of Clarissa’s scent, intoxicated by the faintly acidic odor of her sweat.
Olga Villada, satisfied that she was finally getting somewhere with Clarissa, stepped into the backyard and gazed at the sentinel oak that rose, majestic and powerful, at the edge of Jake’s Hell. The herons pierced the sky above the tree, twin arrows on their way to what? Even she did not know.
The wind blew, and Olga Villada, despite all these years, caught the stench of charred flesh. If she tried hard enough, she could still hear the voices of those men, those wicked, wicked men. And her little boy crying and asking, “Why are they doing this to us, Mama?” Olga Villada stood on a patch of ground she had inhabited for 183 years, and that old, stark sadness took hold; she wanted to double over from the horror of it but was too proud. Even as a ghost, she refused to show the depths to which she hurt.
Her husband emerged from the shadows of the tree, a rusted shovel in hand. She knew what he’d been doing. Unless the tree died—its cells having absorbed the violence perpetrated against Olga Villada’s family—they would never be released from this place. The pain, the cruelty, the fear, were crystallized in the tree’s sap; until that energy was destroyed, the souls of the three victims would remain trapped, and they would be forced to wander through their ghost lives in the same location they had been murdered, unable to ascend the horror. Olga Villada’s husband had spent thousands of hours trying to damage the oak’s root system, slashing open fresh runners, exposing them to insects and disease. He’d doused the tree with gasoline, set it on fire, driven an ax deep into its bark. He’d prayed—not knowing if God existed—for a lightning strike. Nothing worked. For 180 years he’d been trying to kill it. Olga Villada searched the tree; scanned its crown, its limbs, its trunk, looking for signs of canker; and then—shocking even the fly
—she disappeared.
Clarissa, her heart thumping, unable to breathe in the fire pit of the midmorning heat, paused on her way to the house. Her husband, consumed with the sketchbook, had not noticed her.
“Hey,” she said.
He glanced up. “Oh, hey.”
“How’s it going?”
“The shadows on their skin are fantastic.” He removed a pencil from his shirt pocket and began to refine his line drawing.
“Great, but…” She tried to shut up and couldn’t. “You know, they aren’t going to last.” She wasn’t sure if her trivia-clopedic knowledge base was going to help or hurt in this situation, but the chunk of coal forming in her belly gave her a good idea of the outcome.
He rested the sketchbook, which looked small in his big hand, against his thigh. “What are you talking about?” He did not look at her when he asked the question.
“The solstice. The sun will reach its northernmost point for the whole year by noon. For a few moments, our hemisphere will be shadow-free.” She wiped the sweat from her eyes. Could she say nothing, do nothing, to impress him?