One shadow was longer than the rest and grew more quickly: this was Ed coming home.
This is how it always was, how it would be for almost every day in the thirty-four years of our marriage, except for the years when Ed was away in the war. The shadows grew on the hill; the kitchen was hot and smelled, when money was good, like cooked meat, and when it was not, like old bacon fat and potatoes. One shadow grew longer than the others, like a slowly spreading stain, until it seeped into the doorway and became a man.
“What’s for dinner?” Ed would say, if he was in a good mood, as he shrugged off his coat and sat down to unlace his shoes before wiping them carefully with the stiff-bristled brush he kept by the kitchen door.
If he wasn’t in a good mood, if he’d been drinking, he would say: “What the hell have you been brewing in here?”
But in the beginning it was always good. We had our own house, and the freedom to do what we wanted. After Ed’s first day at the Woolworths in Coral River (we furnished half our house with things from there—half on discount, the rest on credit—smells of wool and furniture polish; so many objects crammed together in memory, jostling for space), I gathered handfuls of Jacob’s ladder and leaves from the yard—burnt-edged and brittle, like ancient lace—and arranged them in the old stone hearth, which by then had been cold for twenty years.
“What’s for dinner?” Ed asked, as he shrugged off his jacket. Ed Lundell was the most handsome man I had ever seen, and every time I looked at him, I could think only of my plainness and how lucky I was that he had chosen me. He had ink-black hair, a strong jaw, and walnut-colored eyes.
“Chicken,” I answered. It was a joy to say the word. This was life, and being an adult: to respond this way to one’s husband about dinner. I was twenty and believed we would always be happy.
We ate. We must have. I remember that Ed talked very little about the store, and a lot about the railroad. That was a favorite topic of his in those days. There were rumors that a train line would soon be laid between Boston and Buffalo, cutting within a mile of Coral River. It had been Ed’s big reason for buying the house, which was, at the time, remote: it was a two-mile walk to and from the bus that carried him the remaining two miles into Coral River, and at least a mile jaunt to its nearest neighbor.
Once the train line came, Ed assured me, there would be houses cropping up and down the hills like mushrooms after a rainstorm, a forest of bleached white skeleton-houses, shingled siding, modern plumbing. We’d be the pioneers. He wouldn’t be surprised if the rail company offered to buy us out for three times what we’d paid or more—he’d heard of such things happening.
In the end, the line never came; and the house remained as remote as ever—even more remote when Mr. Donovan, our closest neighbor, died in the war and his widow had to move in with a sister in Boston. That was when Ed began to lose his interest in progress, stopped saving up for the newest vacuum cleaner models, stopped exclaiming over the advertisements for electric kettles and televisions.
That was also when there weren’t so many good days anymore.
But that was all down the road. We had years to get through first—a war, winters of cold and hunger, Maggie’s birth, long, bitter seasons of silence. We couldn’t have known that the railroad wouldn’t come. We were kids and didn’t know anything.
I overcooked the chicken. I remember that. The skin was rubbery but Ed was too hungry to notice, and he finished his plate and asked for seconds, and I was so glad. I kissed him on his beautiful forehead when I got up to make him another plate.
At the end of the meal he noticed the leaves and the Jacob’s ladder in the hearth. He pushed away from the table.
“What is that trash?” he asked, standing up abruptly.
“Leaves and flowers from the yard,” I said. “I thought they would look pretty.”
He frowned. “Clean it up,” he said, belched loudly, and left the room.
It was the first time in our married life that I felt like crying. But I didn’t. I thought of my parents, and how pleased they would be to know I was unhappy—we warned her, they would say—and instead I went straight to the stone fireplace and began picking out the leaves, one by one. The hearth was coated with a fine layer of ancient ash, like a soft, gray snow, and by the time I was finished, it streaked my skin to the elbow. I couldn’t bring myself to throw the flowers and the leaves in the garbage; instead, I gathered them in my arms and took them out into the yard, released them to the wind, and let them scatter over the hills, where the purple shadows had dimmed to uniform darkness. I had a sudden, desperate urge to run; but instead I stood still, frozen, while the wind picked up and the bats began to race across the moon, until Ed called out to me to come inside.
I went inside.
I remember:
The metal bed frame, knocking, knocking, knocking against the wall; the sound of a coyote screaming in the night.
You see? Even now, I can follow the memory thread down. The past stirs under the ashes and pokes its petals from the dust.
Once everyone is asleep—Minna in the Yellow Room, with one arm looped around Amy’s waist, their hair intermingling on the pillows; Trenton in the Blue Room, lying on his back, arms flat at his sides, as though he has been felled by a blow; and Caroline in the Daisy Room, because at the last minute she expressed a horror of sleeping in the master suite, which looks identical to the way it did during the years of her marriage; and even Sandra, although awake, of course, has gone silent and still, so that her presence is nearly imperceptible—I can’t stop thinking about what Caroline said to Minna about death.
It isn’t an infection, she said. She might be right. Then again, we’ve nested in the walls like bacteria. We’ve taken over the house, its insulation and its plumbing—we’ve made it our own.
Or maybe it’s life that is the infection: a feverish dream, a hallucination of feelings. Death is purification, a cleansing, a cure.
In the morning, Minna gets up early to pick up large boxes from the hardware store downtown. By the time the others are waking, she has assembled a dozen of them and lined them up neatly like a series of cardboard coffins, ready to enfold the remains of Richard Walker’s earthly existence.
And so the cleansing begins.
PART II
THE STUDY
SANDRA
“Monstrous,” Minna says. “Absolutely monstrous. It looks like a vulva.”
I’ll say this about Minna: she may be as deep as a puddle but she is funny. And she’s right. The lamp on Richard Walker’s desk is meant to look like a rose—all droops and loops of pink and white fabric, with tiny electric lights budding in between—but the effect is more like a fat lady peeling back her skirt.