As she left the Faculty Club that afternoon, Connie’s mind had been humming with excitement, veering between pleasure at Chilton’s approval and plans for the next stage of her research. She was so submerged in her own thoughts that she collided with Thomas, her thesis student, as he approached her on the path by the undergraduate library.
“Ow! Connie,” Thomas whined, rubbing the toe that she had trod upon. She laughed.
“I’m sorry, Thomas!” she cried, grabbing at his skinny elbow to keep him from toppling over. “I’m fresh from a dissertation meeting with Chilton. I was just thinking a little too hard.”
They crossed Harvard Yard together, Thomas hopping at intervals to underscore to Connie the mortality of his injury as she chatted with him about his summer job reshelving books at the library.
“I can’t believe you haven’t called me,” Thomas said, sulking. “How am I going to get my grad school applications done without your help? I’m already starting to outline my personal statement, and it’s a total disaster.”
She sighed. “Oh, Thomas. You don’t want to go to grad school, do you? You could just graduate and get a nice job at a bank or something.”
Thomas scowled. “That’s what my mother said. Now you’re sounding like my mother.”
“Sorry. I guess I’m getting old. Anyway, I can’t call you. Granna’s house doesn’t have a phone.”
“It doesn’t have a phone?” Thomas repeated, incredulous.
“No electricity, either,” she affirmed. “What can I say? I’m being rustic this summer. And people will be lining up, I am sure, to buy a house with all those environmentally conscious, inconvenient, nonelectric appliances. You’ve probably never seen a nonelectric icebox, have you?”
“Why don’t you just get one installed?” Thomas suggested. “Rotary phones don’t take electricity.”
Connie stopped, looked at her student, and grinned.
“ALL SET,” THE MAN CALLED THROUGH THE OPEN FRONT DOOR. CONNIE was still sifting through her notes on the desk, and the sound of his voice made her notice the darkness beginning to puddle in the corners of the sitting room. She was always puzzled that people say that darkness falls. To her it seemed instead to rise, massing under trees and shrubs, pouring out from under furniture, only reaching the sky when the spaces near the ground were full. She rose, stretching and cracking her knuckles.
“This is great,” Connie said, passing her hand over the black rotary phone that now squatted on the tiny side table in the front entry.
“Most folks like a cordless now, ya know,” the man commented, lifting and settling his hat again.
“Yeah,” said Connie. “No plug.”
The man shrugged, betraying no apparent surprise that an inhabited house in a closely settled town at the end of the twentieth century could still be unelectrified.
“Bill’ll come in the mail,” he grunted, turning to make his way back down the flagstone path that led to the street.
“Thanks!” she called out after him.
“Need some lights out heah” was the vanishing response, and then Connie was alone.
THE TELEPHONE RANG FOUR TIMES BEFORE IT WAS PICKED UP WITH GREAT commotion, and Grace’s voice said, “Hello?”
“Mom?” said Connie. She leaned in the doorway between the entry and the dining room, watching the shadows of evening collect in the bowls of the dead potted plants that hung motionless, like dried spiders, in the windows. She should really throw those away. Why hadn’t she gotten around to that yet?
“Connie, my darling! What a pleasure. I didn’t think I’d hear from you again so soon,” said Grace. For some reason, Connie imagined that Grace had been baking. She pictured her mother, hair still long, graying, standing with the telephone pressed to her cheek in the kitchen of her Santa Fe house. She imagined she saw Grace’s hands caked with flour, a splotch of it now spread across her telephone receiver.
“Fine. What are you making?” Connie asked, hazarding a guess.
“Samosas. But I can’t get the consistency right—the batter keeps pulling apart.”
“You should add more ghee.”
“I am, but that makes them so greasy!” Grace sighed, and Connie imagined her blowing aside a loose strand of hair. It would still be light outside in Santa Fe, and Connie pictured her mother’s kitchen sink, its windowsill crowded with fat, bristling cacti and hybrids of thyme. When she moved west, Grace’s plants had all taken on a prickly, dry quality. Changing with the mandates of the earth, Grace called it, whatever that was supposed to mean. Grace had complicated ideas about the relationship between weather and consciousness, for plants as well as for people. She liked to claim that electromagnetic fields caused by changing weather patterns could directly impact the auras of people, even changing their personalities or their abilities. Connie usually met this idea with patience, if not agreement. Grace had complicated ideas about most things, actually.
“I could do with a samosa right about now,” said Connie. Grace chuckled.
“So tell me, darling,” said her mother. “How is the house coming?”
“Slowly but surely,” Connie replied, twisting the stretchy telephone cord around one thumb. The digit flushed red, and Connie freed it. “I’ve…started making a few changes, I guess.”
“Putting in the telephone was an excellent idea,” her mother said, her voice traveling together with the sound of a wooden spoon stirring wet batter.
“Mom! How did you know?” Connie laughed.
“Where else would you be calling from at dinnertime? Mother used to have one, you know. Took it out sometime in the sixties. Too much hassle, she said. Used to worry me sick, that something might happen and she wouldn’t be able to reach anybody. There was no changing her mind, of course.”
“She must have been very particular,” said Connie.
“Oh, you have no idea,” said Grace, and for an instant Connie heard in her voice an echo of her mother’s teenage self. “How much longer before it’s ready to sell?”
“Ah.” Connie stalled. She had spent so much of her time on research that she had barely begun on the house. But if she was honest with herself, there was more to her reticence than that. Her eyes slid past the dead plant in its cracked porcelain China-export pot, traveling into the dim sitting room with its armchairs. The previous week she had scrubbed down their needlepoint upholstery with gentle wool detergent, and they now glowed a warm reddish brown, comfortable and clean. After dinner Connie planned to kindle a small fire and read there until she grew sleepy. She felt oddly protective of the little room, unwilling to disturb it. “Awhile yet.”
“Connie,” her mother began, voice once again that of a forty-seven-year-old woman.
“It was a real mess, Mom. It’s going to take longer than I thought,” Connie insisted.
Grace sighed. “Uh-huh. So tell me. If you haven’t been working on the house as we discussed, what have you been doing? How are those headaches you mentioned?” Connie heard the sound of a spoon being laid to the side and batter being rolled out on a chopping block. A bleep sounded as Grace’s chin dug into the keypad of her telephone.
“They’re fine,” Connie said, aware as she did so that while her daydreams had stayed vivid, she had not noticed the headaches afterward nearly as much. The shift had been gradual, almost imperceptible, but there it was.
“See? You didn’t need a doctor,” Grace interjected.
“Yeah,” Connie said, dismissive. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been doing dissertation research.” She attempted to imbue her voice with a mote of authority.
“Oh?” said Grace, losing interest.
“Remember that name I asked you about?” Connie said. “I did some background work on it, and I think it’s led me to a possible primary source for my dissertation.”
“A primary source? What sort of primary source?” asked Grace. Her voice carried a faint gloss of suspicion, but Connie pushed the thought away.
“It looks like Deliverance Dane mi
ght have actually owned some kind of instructional magic book! Isn’t that incredible?”
“Incredible,” Grace echoed, her voice flattening.
“It goes against everything historians have always said about the relationship between women and vernacular religion during the colonial period!” Connie exclaimed, voice rising.
“You were right,” her mother said over the whisper and squish of dough under her fingers. “I did need to add more ghee.”
“Mom,” said Connie.
“I’m listening,” said Grace.
“Now all I have to do is find the book. So far the probate records seem to be pretty much intact, so I have to follow the trail of the book as each owner dies. That assumes that each successive generation finds the book significant enough to mention in a will. But even if the book is probated together with several other books, I might still be able to trace its movement within the collection. Then, maybe, I’ll get lucky.”
“Oh, my darling, you don’t need some dusty old book to be lucky.” Grace sighed.
“Grace,” said Connie, sliding into a seated position in the doorway of the dining room. “This is an important find for me. It could be a real research coup. It could make my reputation. Why is it so hard for you to understand that this is important to me?”
“I know that it’s important to you, sweetheart,” said Grace. “I’m not trying to dismiss what you do. I just worry that all this energy that you put into your work, as you call it, just takes you further away from really knowing yourself.”
Connie inhaled deeply, wrestling her rage into a jagged ball under her diaphragm, and exhaled silently through her nose. Darkness had spread through the dining room, swallowing the shapes of the table and chairs, even rubbing away the hanging planters. Arlo wandered over from where he had been resting under the table and settled on the floor next to Connie, his furry chin in her lap.
“I know myself perfectly well,” she said, trying to wring the sound of anger out of her voice.
“I don’t mean to upset you, my darling,” her mother soothed. “Hold on, let me just pop these into the oven.”
Connie heard the clatter as the telephone was placed on a tile countertop two time zones away. A creak and scrape signaled the opening of Grace’s oven and the sliding in of a cookie sheet heavy with samosas. Connie pictured her mother briskly wiping her floured palms on her apron—that one that Connie really hated, that said OM IS WHERE THE HEART IS. The receiver knocked against something, and then her mother’s soft breath carried down the telephone wires and washed over her cheek. Connie felt her annoyance throb a little less.
“All I’m saying,” Grace said, “is that it couldn’t hurt to spend a little time looking into yourself and see what’s going on in there. You are a special, remarkable person, Connie, whether you find the book or not. At this point, I just don’t think you need it, that’s all.”
Connie felt her upper lip twitch and her nose and cheeks flush with salt water. She swallowed, reaching down to grab hold of one of Arlo’s ears. She tugged on the dog’s ear for a moment, saying nothing.
“Now,” Grace said, pretending to ignore Connie’s rising silence. “Are you ready to tell me about the boy yet?”
Connie breathed deeply, smiling in spite of herself through the tear that was snaking its way into the corner of her mouth.
“No,” she managed to say.
“All right, I suppose it can wait.” Grace sighed. “But we’ll have to talk about it sooner or later.”
Connie rolled her eyes. “Okay, Mom,” she said. And then she hung up.
CHAPTER TEN
Marblehead, Massachusetts
Somewhere around the Summer Solstice
1991
“HEY, CORNELL!” A VOICE SAID, AND THE WORDS FLOATED IN SANS serif script across the plane of Connie’s dreaming mind. They drifted over the image of Grace—or was it the woman in the portrait downstairs?—in a hospital gown, standing barefoot in the snow. The woman in the dream extended her arms, mouth open, screaming, but no sound came out. The sky overhead had a sun and moon in it together, and then the woman disappeared under a writhing coil of snakes, replicating and spreading out across the snow, coming toward her. Connie scowled in her sleep, limbs twitching.
“Hey! Cornell!” The words appeared again, the visual form of them breaking apart in little droplets of rainwater at the vibrating sound of something banging on the front door of the house. The dream dissolved into trailing skeins of thought as Connie was pulled upward toward consciousness. She became aware of the bed underneath her, of the pressure of dog feet against the back of her neck. She opened one eye.
The banging had followed her out of her dream and was now vibrating up through the floor, rattling the door latch. Connie sat up, hair askew, and wiped her eyes with one forearm. Arlo rolled onto his side with a yawn, legs stretching into the warm space in the bed that she had just vacated.
“What the hell,” she muttered, shuffling across the slanted attic bedroom. She made her way down the stairs, toes hanging over each narrow step. Scratching her hair midyawn, she opened the front door.
“Hold this,” said the voice, and a carryout cup of coffee was thrust into her hands. Behind the coffee cup Connie found Sam, in cargo shorts, Doc Martens, and a Black Flag T-shirt, holding a box of doughnuts. “Keeping grad school hours, huh?” He grinned, edging around her into the front hall. His arm brushed against her shoulder, leaving a tingling patch on the skin underneath her T-shirt.
Connie blinked.
“Ah, dining room!” said Sam, ambling into the old hall and setting the pastry box on the table. “You want a plate? Nah, you don’t need a plate.”
“Sam, what—” she started to ask.
“Eleven-thirty,” he said, offering her a chocolate-covered Boston cream wrapped in a paper napkin.
“Wow. Really?” she said, accepting the pastry.
“Drink some of that coffee, you’ll feel better,” he assured her.
“But how did you find—” she started again.
“Easy. Looked for the only house totally obscured by vines,” he said, settling in one of the shield-back chairs and propping one boot on the tabletop with a smile. “It’s a great one, by the way. Terrific shape.”
“Are you kidding?” she asked. “It’s a wreck. Every time I go upstairs I’m a little afraid it’s going to fall over completely.”
“No way,” he said, shaking his head.
“Look.” Connie dug a fingernail into one of the naked wooden beams crossing the threshold between the dining room and the entryway, and crumbled wooden dust spattered down from overhead. “Falling apart.” She lowered herself into a chair at the dining table, glancing at him as she did so.
Sam looked up, then shrugged. “Powder post beetles. You expect that in a beam that old. Probably came in with the wood, back when it was built. About 1700, right? Then they’ve been gone for two hundred years, easy. It looks bad, but inside, that beam’s like steel.”
He bit into a jelly doughnut, leaving a white smear of powdered sugar around his lips.
“When they built it,” he continued, “they used green wood for the pegs to hold the posts and beams together, so it would go in soft around the joint and then harden into place. The only thing that’s going to take this house down is a bulldozer.” Sam grinned, wiping slowly at the powdered sugar with the back of one wrist. “Nothing beats old hardwood,” he said, watching her.
Connie swallowed, her ears blushing, and hastily pulled her gaze away. She bit into her own doughnut, not looking at him.
“There are women who would find this pretty weird, you know,” she said presently, sucking crumbles of chocolate off her thumb.
“Yeah,” he conceded. “I’ve gone out with a few of them.” As Sam chewed, Arlo materialized under the table and sniffed at his leg. They ate for a moment in silence, Connie slurping her coffee. She became acutely conscious of the fact that she was sitting in front of Sam in faded plaid pajamas. Why tha
t felt more intimate, more embarrassing, than swimming in her underwear with him in the dark she could not say. Their night swim, obscured as it was by darkness and fog, felt almost as if she had imagined it. They had passed several hours together, splashing and playing in the water. When they tired of swimming they had stretched out side by side on the raft, gazing up at the sky as the fog parted just enough to reveal a sprinkling of stars overhead. They lapsed into silence, not touching or speaking, Connie intensely aware of Sam’s proximity, but frightened of letting her fingers take his hand, afraid that if she did so the unreality of the night would vanish. Now in the clarity of daylight she knew that it had been real. The warm blush on her ears started to creep down from her hairline onto her cheeks, and she crossed her legs without thinking.
“So,” Sam said. Wagging, Arlo reared up and put a pair of happy front paws in his lap. Sam rubbed the animal’s cheek and turned to Connie. “What are we doing today?”
“What?” Connie said through a mouthful of cream filling.
“I have the day off,” Sam explained. “I’ve been thinking about your mystery witch. I figured you probably have a lot of research to do, and I’m kind of invested in your topic now. So…” He spread his hands out, shrugging. He waited for a beat, and when she did not respond immediately, said, “Of course, if you don’t feel like working today, I could always just show you around a little. Whatever.” He plucked another pastry out of the box, not looking at her.
Connie felt a shiver of pleased excitement vibrate in her middle and wander down her arms and legs, and she smiled. “Just give me a minute to get dressed,” she said.
A SMALL CHILD RAN UP ON QUICK FEET, AN OVERLARGE BLACK WITCH HAT covered in purple spangles balanced on its head. “Abracadabra!” she said, hands splayed for maximum effect, and then scampered to hide behind an ivy plant next to a woman seated at a café table who, Connie assumed from her beatific smile, could only be her mother. Sam, meanwhile, had tumbled to the brick walkway, arms and legs cartwheeled out at an angle.