The Den Read online

  Bedroom window. I latched right on to that. His bedroom.

  “Anyway, his stupid grandmother’s home,” she said. She began to chew at the left corner of her mouth, which sent her pursed lips to the opposite side. It was a habit our mother frequently told her to quit, saying it made her look like a horse. Sometimes Henrietta chewed so hard she would bleed. Now, though, she stopped right away to announce: “The bitch.” Then my sister turned smartly on her heels and soared down the road toward the trestle. I chased after her. The sun glared before us, and in its blinding light I could make out only the shadowed forms up on the tracks above the water, and their occasional, ghostly leaps downward. I could hear their hollers and splashes, but so far as I could tell, even when we reached the base of that massive bridge, our own presence remained unnoticed by the jumpers.

  The trail to the trestle had been carved up an eroding bank beneath the bridge where the tracks crossed over the road. My sister scurried right up it like a single-minded bug. I followed her haphazardly, increasingly aware with every step that I was once again headed somewhere I was not supposed to go.

  There had been at least one teen death there. I never knew anything about how it had happened, and I’d never been even remotely sensitive to the fact that an actual boy had been lost to an actual family. I’d simply let his death open in my mind like the fiction I read: troubling, compelling, capable only of creating the sort of emotion I could enter or exit at will. It would have been dramatic, his life and subsequent death. A pregnant girlfriend? A murder? A half-hearted fall, not entirely on purpose. A terrible, hungry mystery.

  By the time I had made my way to the top of the path, I was covered in dry silt. My sister had already crested the hill. I peered over the edge to watch her walk onto the tracks, but just as I gathered the nerve to continue after her, she threw her chin back over her shoulder and glared at me. I understood. I squatted back down, then inched my way over to the safety of an old pine. Tucked behind it, I spied. The voices were too distant to discern, so I took in all the details. Graffiti on the iron sides of the bridge: Mike loves Amanda and Tammy loves Rob and Tammy is a whore and PEACE. Litter, too—old Pepsi cans, empty bags of Fritos, empty and stomped packs of cigarettes. Four girls, not including my sister, and three boys. The boys held hands and launched themselves over the edge. I heard their splashes, and soon I heard their voices become ever clearer. It took a moment for me to realize that their route back up the bank would cross right by me. Quickly I slid around to the far side of the pine as their scrawny, sun-darkened bodies climbed that path and returned to the trestle. If they saw me hovering there, they didn’t let on.

  And then came Kaus. Where the other boys had scrambled, and grabbed for limbs or roots, and lost their footing more than once, Kaus seemed to simply glide up that bank. When he spotted me behind the tree he gave a wink, and then he held his pointer finger in front of his mouth and blew. Shhh.

  Kaus, glistening. One time I would hear him speak his ancestral language, but it wouldn’t be for me. It would be for Henrietta, who’d begged and begged. They’d been naked, stretched out on the old afghans she’d spread on the floor of the barn. First he whispered in her ear and then he put his hands under his resting head and just kept on talking. It didn’t occur to me then that his words carried any meaning. I’d been on my tiptoes, hidden outside the barn, spying, and this speech of his was the most magical thing I had ever heard.

  Of course, in our town, we had never heard any other language but English, save for the French and Spanish learned in high school. Until his family moved in that summer, I don’t know that we’d ever even seen anyone from another country walk our streets. Which surely contributed to the oncoming trouble.

  Emboldened by his kind gesture, when he was back on the trestle I scampered higher up the bank to watch. Once again there was no mistaking his direction or purpose. Straight to my sister that boy walked. When he reached her he grabbed her hips and pulled her forward, toward his own body. My sister curved her back, their middles pressed together momentarily, and then, smooth as dancers, those two folded open to stand side by side. Kaus tucked one of his hands into the backside of her shorts, and in this way they walked down the tracks, away from the others. Everyone kept watch. Besides the shock, I remember being aware that this scene was the best thing I had ever witnessed, better even than a book.

  When my sister and Kaus stopped walking, they sealed their bodies back together, but this time they both faced the river, with his front pressed against her back. He reached his hands around her waist, right down into her shorts. Henrietta, from what I could tell, kept her vision fixed on the water below, and Kaus kept his own face buried in her neck. Then, suddenly, my sister’s head burst back. The kids on the trestle laughed and clapped. In response my sister, without a trace of preamble, stepped forward, right off that bridge.

  And still the show wasn’t over. I panicked with her down there in the water, but she came up soon enough. I had moved completely out of my hiding place by now, and I ran right over to meet her as she approached, but she neither scolded me nor stopped to speak with me. She just blew a kiss on her way past, then walked right back up into that crowd. This time Kaus had a cigarette lit, and when my sister approached him he held it to her lips. She drew in deeply and somehow, despite all that had just occurred, this was as sexy an act as I’d ever seen.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t know that I ever even finished Flowers in the Attic, or any other book that summer. All I know is that even more alluring than anything I could read was Henrietta, her unfolding. That summer she transformed out of my sister and into a girl—a woman, really—whom I scarcely recognized. She’d been the only girl to jump off the trestle that day, and when she fell her arms had been stretched out like wings. On our walk home she showed me what this meant. The underside of her arms, their light, nearly translucent skin, had already turned a terrible, yellowish shade of purple.

  “Dad is going to kill you,” I said.

  “He won’t know.”

  “What are you going to do, wear long sleeves all summer?”

  She did. It became her signature style. The next morning she walked downstairs wearing a long-sleeved flannel that she’d cut off just below her bra, so that a long, thin expanse of belly was exposed. At some point that summer, there was a baby in there. The start of a baby, I mean. That infinitesimal cell that would have grown into one.

  * * *

  —

  The very next morning, I woke early from a fitful, anxious sleep. The knowledge of my sister’s love affair tormented me. I ran across the hall and knocked on her bedroom door. When she didn’t answer I turned the knob, but it would not open. I turned it again, and I rattled it, and finally I realized that my sister had locked her door. So far as I knew, she had never done this before.

  “Henrietta?” I called. I knocked and knocked, and when she still would not answer I began to imagine what she might have done: snuck out the window, or maybe even snuck her boyfriend in. Eventually, I pounded at the door and yelled her name.

  “Damn you,” she finally yelled back. I froze and waited for her footsteps across the creaky wood floor. But all that came was more scolding: She was sleeping, she said, and if I didn’t leave her alone I would be dead meat. I left her door. I went downstairs, sat on the couch, and turned on the TV but really just watched the clock. My sister slept and slept and slept. It was afternoon when she finally emerged. I had made sandwiches—making lunch, during our summer days, was something Henrietta had long ago come to rely on me for. Without me she would have lived on plain saltines and once in a while a spread of fluff. But now she refused my offering of an egg-salad sandwich.

  “Smells like ass,” she said. She threw open the fridge door and just stood in front of it.

  “Waster,” I snapped. “You’re wasting electricity.” It was what our parents would have said.
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  “God,” she said. “There’s nothing to drink in this house.”

  We were a family of milk and water and orange juice. Was it a can of soda she was after? Or alcohol? She slammed the fridge and walked out. Out of the kitchen, out of the house, out of the driveway. Gone until evening. And when she returned, my parents said not a word.

  * * *

  —

  For weeks it continued in this way. Emerging late, disappearing, and thoroughly done with me. Once, early on, I followed her, but just as she crossed the little bridge into town she turned around and spotted me. It was enough. I went home. My desire, at least in the beginning, to stay on Henrietta’s good side won out over my curiosity.

  Still, I was sick with worry. She was getting rapidly thinner. She’d started vomiting each day before she left the house, and in this new, vanishing body her legs stuck out like broomsticks from the wide breadth of her shorts, and her arms seemed so weak they might as well have been crafted from the broomsticks’ brush counterparts. My question, called from outside the closed bathroom door, “What are you doing in there?” and her flippant response—“Just pulling the trigger, god”—had become practically our only interaction.

  And so, while my sister was out, I began to scour her room for clues. For years she had written in a journal, and though I had always been hopelessly nosy, I’d also always understood this particular activity as her private affair, and a sacred one. I had never so much as glanced at those pages. Yet now I flipped relentlessly through them, searching for his name. What I found, though, was both shocking and unsatisfying: page after page of my sister’s journals were dedicated solely to our father’s horses, to their conditions. All this time, I discovered, Henrietta had been keeping copious notes about the temperature in the barn, and whether or not there had been rain or snow or wind, and the horses’ perceived comfort, and their measurements, and their diet. I had never known my sister to do anything so careful and routine, and I was mystified. Yet nowhere in that room was one single trace of Kaus and her secret life with him.

  But I did not have the courage to go out searching for her, not yet. So, to occupy my mind, I began to write imaginary stories of their love affair. It was my first attempt at fiction. The names I always kept the same—Henrietta and Kaus—and I always included that trestle in the story. I would write their meeting, their compulsive need to be together, and ultimately, every time, their eventual ruin. This was no happy love story; no matter what I intended, Kaus would break Henrietta’s heart over and over again.

  I scared myself with those stories I wrote. They became so real to me. If I imagined Henrietta thrown into the river by her lover, I would spend the entire day terrified not only that it must be true, but that my thinking it had made it so. And in this terrible way, the heavy, endless summer days passed ever forward with me at their center, alone. Only occasionally would my mother emerge, and then only to grab something to eat. She never took the time to prepare whatever it was—she just grabbed a block of cheese or the jar of peanut butter and then retreated back upstairs without a word. Sometimes, on days when her work must have been going along poorly, I could hear her pacing overhead. I could hear her hit a wall sometimes, or throw what I assumed was a paintbrush across the room. Yet she would not give up for the day until dinnertime, so for the first time in my life I was left entirely to my own imagination. Finally, it took me over. I became so certain that my sister was in terrible trouble that I marched right into town to search for her.

  This would have been mid-July. The tiger lilies were out in full force. Their fiery heads lined the roadsides, burning a path to my sister. They led to town first. Up and down Main Street I walked, without sign of her. I ducked into the little store, but even then I understood this simply as preparation; she wouldn’t be there, not now that she had him. Finally I gathered my courage and I marched myself down to Church Street. Determined, I climbed up the bank and onto the trestle. I stood at the start of the bridge, right in the center of the tracks, but even so, I kept my arms stretched out for balance. I was aware of being unwelcome, but that did not matter to me; as that particular afternoon stretched on it seemed ever more dire that I find my sister, that I save her.

  “Henrietta?” I called pathetically to the teenagers on the bridge.

  They all looked at me, laughed and smiled and shook their heads, and then they went back to spitting and jumping off the bridge, and Henrietta, I understood they were saying in these careless movements, had moved on. Henrietta was now that kind of girl.

  Of course she was. I ran off the bridge and straight to the red house where he lived. I pounded on the door. I hadn’t thought of what to ask, but it turned out I didn’t need to ask anything. It must have been Kaus’s grandmother who answered. Her cheeks were like soft, full balloons.

  “No,” she said when she opened the door. “No, no, no.” Just a little puff of a word. I wandered home, sick for my sister to return.

  * * *

  —

  Finally, I resorted to tattling on Henrietta, though of course my parents already knew that she was perpetually absent. Still, my speaking up made my father do the same. He told her she could not traipse around all day. My mother, though, she sighed and said, “Let her have her freedoms, Charley.” This had been after dinner, after Henrietta and I had gone upstairs and then been called back down. After our mother had smoked a bit of her little joint, too.

  “Then she has to take Jane with her. Henrietta, when you go out in the day you have to take Jane with you.”

  “La, de, da,” Henrietta said.

  And our mother, “For Christ’s sake, Charley.”

  * * *

  —

  During that period, there were just two shining moments when my sister spoke about Kaus. Once was when I found her on the living room floor, our father’s oversized atlas spread open before her. “Luang Prabang,” she said easily as she ran her pointer finger over the dim orange border of the place he had come from. “Muong Beng,” she said. But when I crouched down next to her and asked her what she knew about that place, she cackled, slammed the atlas shut, and said, “It’s shaped like a limp dick, that’s what.”

  The only other time was when my mother, sister, and I happened to be in the kitchen together. It was then that my sister said dreamily, “I’d do anything for Kaus.”

  We were eating the red pistachios that our father loathed and drinking a rare treat of lemonade made so thick with sugar that we could feel the grains on our tongues.

  “Don’t you let your father hear that,” our mother said sharply, and then, without washing the red dye from her hands, she returned to the safety of her third-floor studio, leaving us girls, once again, to fend for ourselves.

  II

  OUR FATHER was a storyteller, and when we were children his favorite of all stories was “The Den.” It was based on the old foundation in our own woods, just through the field and over the stone wall. Once upon a time, our father would say, that foundation had been a small home for a family of five: mother, father, three sons. The parents were immigrants from Scotland, come over to work at the mill, and the three boys had been born here, on their unfinished floorboards. Poor and good, the whole lot of them. From there, the details of the story changed according to our father’s mood—one day the five of them walked to town; one day they went for a snowshoe; one day they spent the whole afternoon inside, making a grand dinner for their father, because it was his birthday, and he loved nothing more than beef stew followed by a chocolate cake with sugar glaze, et cetera, et cetera. Eventually, no matter what other details he’d included or abandoned, our father would come upon the date: January 19, 1852. Cold Friday. The day when the temperature dropped to an impossible 31 degrees below in a matter of hours and the mercury froze in its gauge and a violent, piercing wind blew across the field and through the woods, breaking the family’s windows in. The mother and three boys hu
ddled in a bed in the middle of the room while their father ran through the woods and across the field to the house that would become, in some one hundred years, our own home.

  Back then, our house belonged to Mr. Josiah Bartlett, who on that night shepherded the cold father inside, then left to suit up and drive his own sleigh into the storm to save his neighbors in the woods. It was a short distance, and because his horses and sleigh were strong and well built, Mr. Bartlett made it quickly through the blinding snow and wind, but he knew before even dismounting that no family remained. Despite the ungodly storm, an eerie calm had spread around the house, enclosing it. When Mr. Bartlett climbed down from his sleigh, his footsteps seemed to echo. Snow blew at his sides yet somehow did not cross his field of vision, which led directly through the broken windows to the fireplace. There, before the glowing remains of the fire, sat five coyotes, steam rising off their hunched shoulders. They turned their heads to him in unison and Mr. Bartlett met their hungry gaze for one moment, and then the snow and wind overtook him. He crawled the few paces back to his sleigh, using his hands as a guide. Once mounted, he ran those horses home as fast as he ever had. After that, not one member of that Scottish family was ever seen again, not even the father, who should have been waiting safely in Mr. Bartlett’s parlor.

  Our mother, whenever she heard our father tell Henrietta and me this story, would remark that coyotes hadn’t even lived this far east back then. Sometimes our father would ignore this comment, and sometimes he would say, “But Sylvia, how do you really know?”

  I sided with him. It didn’t ruin the story. In fact, the idea that according to science coyotes hadn’t yet existed here made it even better to me, even more mysterious. About the family’s actual fate, our father was always vague, leaving us to our own interpretations. I always imagined that family to have transformed out of their own bodies and into those of the wild dogs. Yet no matter what each of us thought, the story itself was still a part of our landscape, our very own fairy tale. During snowstorms, my sister and I would pretend to hear howls. In all seasons we would go out to the foundation—The Den, as our father had named it—and spend hours inside its four crumbled walls. We’d start a fire in what remained of the fireplace. We’d play house, Henrietta the mother and I one of the children. We particularly loved fall out there, when the wind felt like a flood of ghosts sweeping through the woods, carrying leaves on its collective back. When we really did hear the howling at night, our father wouldn’t say anything reasonable about the danger the chickens or whatever other animals we had at the time might be in. He would just look at us conspiratorially and say, “Is it a coyote? Or is it that family’s voice?”