Ghosts of the Missing Read online

  But when I lowered the mirror slowly, I saw only myself and the unmade bed behind me. I ran a finger down my cheek. It looked like a whittler had been at work on my face. Sharply. I turned away and headed downstairs in the plaid pants and T-shirt I had slept in.

  Michan was in the kitchen, pouring himself a cup of coffee. I sat down at the island as he wordlessly took another mug from the cabinet.

  My dog came over, wagging his tail, and I leaned over to pet him. When I was home, Poe usually slept in my room, but I’d tricked him by going to bed so early. I hoped he hadn’t been scratching at the door and I hadn’t heard.

  Michan placed a mug in front of me and sat down.

  “Feeling better?”

  I nodded, though my chest still ached and the walk downstairs had left me slightly short of breath. In the crook of my elbow, there was a green and yellow bruise from the IV.

  “You look like shit.” Michan raised his coffee cup to me.

  I raised my cup back.

  “I’m going to be working most of the day, but if you need me, knock,” he said.

  I knew he was deep into the edits for his latest book. I looked away guiltily. By giving me permission to interrupt him, he was telling me how much I’d scared him.

  “Are you teaching this semester?” I asked, mainly to fill the silence.

  He was a professor at Gilbride College and well known enough for his classes to be a draw. It was said of him that he began to write after his brother’s death, and though he tried to explain that this wasn’t so, that he’d wanted to write long before HIV, he could never correct the impression. Either way, he was still never quite comfortable with the way he was known not only for his work but for his grief and his good fortune.

  Once the doctors confirmed, to their astonishment and Michan’s weary I-told-you-so, that he was, indeed, immune to HIV, or at least resistant (theories varied), he offered himself to science. Take whatever you need, he’d said. He meant blood, but if they’d asked for an arm or even his heart, I think he would have gladly given either.

  Used to be, at his readings, Michan would get at least one question about it during the Q&A, specifically asking him to explain, but that was rare now. He avoided terminology and simply said that his cells were essentially in HIV lockdown. The virus could not get in.

  “I’m teaching four classes,” he said. “Gin says it’s too much.”

  Gin, his longtime girlfriend, dark-haired and nearly his height, was protective of Michan’s health in a way nobody else thought to be.

  I smiled. “How is she?”

  “She’s fine. Busy. She doesn’t need anyone in the bookstore now, but said possibly around the holidays,” Michan said. “You could work food prep.”

  “Food prep?” I repeated, certain I’d missed something he’d said.

  “You can’t possibly think I’m going to let you live here without putting you to work,” Michan said, smiling.

  Moye House did not deliver lunches to the writers’ doors like some other writers’ colonies. But the refrigerator was kept fully stocked, and residents were free to make their own food or help themselves to leftovers. There were also dorm-size refrigerators in each room. The truly focused and organized could bring lunch upstairs with them after breakfast so they didn’t have to leave their rooms at all. Many did do this at first, but after two weeks there was a fall-off. That was because they’d gotten to know one another by then, Michan said. They sought each other’s company around lunchtime. He didn’t quite approve.

  Moye House had a cook with a staff who made the dinner every evening. Michan never joined the residents. As a child, I believed it was so he could eat with me in the corner nook of the kitchen, in a real-family sort of way, but I’d been gone for a long time now and he still didn’t eat with the others.

  Most of the house’s rooms and furnishings remained as they were in Cassius Moye’s time, but the kitchen had been remodeled and modernized so that it was possible to cook for a large group.

  Food prep, I knew, meant slicing vegetables and shredding lettuce.

  “Hey, does the job come with health insurance?” I asked.

  Michan didn’t laugh. “If this is your way of asking if I will pay for your meds, the answer is yes, for now of course, but not forever. You need to be self-reliant. I don’t know how else to say it.”

  I won’t be around forever, he meant. No HIV, but still hemophilia, hep C. He didn’t like to talk about either, which made it easy for me to pretend that he was perfectly fine, always.

  “You’re okay, right? I mean—”

  “I’m okay,” Michan said more gently. “Don’t worry about me. I was saving this talk for when you’d been home for a few days, but since you brought it up, yes, you need to stay insured. You just do.”

  “And if someone objects to me touching their food?” I said.

  My status was not a secret here. It was the rare resident who was unfamiliar with Michan’s biography. If anyone did come here not knowing, then they soon found out.

  Michan tugged on a lock of my hair, which meant he was in big brother mode.

  “Our writers are generally an enlightened group. Which you know. Besides, if you do food prep without wearing gloves, Mrs. Penrose will throw you out of the house. She won’t care that you live here. Try another tactic.”

  “The gloves won’t be made of steel. They’re not going to help if I cut my finger open with a knife.”

  “Then the best practice is not to cut your finger open with a knife,” he said. “But Shannon can always use help in the office. We’ve talked about hiring a part-time assistant, but we’ve never gotten around to it. She’s too busy to write up the job description.”

  “Why don’t you do it?” I said.

  “She does more work in a day than I do in a week. I wouldn’t know where to start.” He smiled, but it was probably only a slight exaggeration. “I’m going to leave it to you to figure out.” Michan stood up.

  “Because I’m so good at figuring things out,” I called after him.

  “Try harder.”

  After tugging once again on my hair, he left the kitchen.

  Alone at the counter, I looked up at the servants’ bells, which hung near the ceiling. The wires no longer connected them to the upper floors, to stations where the Moye family would have reached out to ring them, summoning the girls and women at work here in the kitchen. They must have grown to hate the sound.

  I went to stand beneath them for a moment before opening the narrow door that hid the servants’ staircase, which went all the way up to the attic, where the maids had slept.

  I climbed the stairs and paused by the window on the landing. Ivy grew up the wall on this side of the house, and it covered the window except for a spot almost directly in the center, where there were no leaves. The story went that long ago, the servant girls had cut away enough of the ivy to create a peephole for themselves. Eventually the plant began to grow that way. It was said that the girls peeked at the men who worked in the stables, but I didn’t believe that. They would only have had glimpses of the men coming and going. I always thought they gazed out at the gardens.

  Care of the gardens was paid for by the town, an arrangement that worked because then Culleton could advertise Moye House as a tourist attraction. The grounds were open to the public on weekends year-round, and in the spring, summer and fall, couples could book weddings of up to fifty people for a fee, and only in the morning before the grounds opened. Rowan and I used to sit on the steps and watch weddings in the rose garden through the ivy window.

  Remember the bride who wore the ring of flowers on her head instead of a veil? And all the way up the aisle, the petals blew away?

  Rowan’s voice, very near.

  Like it was raining roses.

  You’ve been gone so long.

  I didn’t turn around, but instead pressed my forehead against the glass.

  10

  Adair

  November 1994

 
; I walked past the chapel, not far, until I came to the quicken tree, where I lay a hand against its trunk. The bark felt good against my palm, solid and rough. I sat down on the ground about a foot away and opened my sketchpad. Never sure how to begin, I circled the pencil above the page, trying to decide where to set the first line. Michan had told me he would show me the chapel, but I’d been at Moye House for almost a month and he hadn’t mentioned it again. I didn’t want to ask, afraid of bothering him, so one Friday after school I decided to go on my own. We had no homework on Fridays. I had nothing else to do.

  I had erased three false starts when I heard a noise, nothing nearly as definitive as a footstep. Turning, I saw Rowan Kinnane wearing jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt.

  I had not seen her since the day I’d arrived at Moye House. Her mother apparently didn’t like to bring her by. Rowan had a habit of taking off to explore the house, and Evelyn could hardly abandon her work to search for her daughter.

  “It’s about to rain.”

  She said it as though plans we’d made together would now be ruined, and I wondered for a moment if I had invited her to meet me here and had somehow forgotten.

  She walked by me and then, as I had done, touched the tree.

  “I’m named after it,” she said.

  “The tree?” I said, surprised.

  “My father put this tree in his story—”

  “He’s a writer?” I said.

  “He is,” Rowan said. “He came to stay at Moye House a long time ago. That’s where he met my mother. And he wrote about this tree and named me after it.”

  “Quicken?” I said, wondering if it was her middle name.

  “Rowan tree. Quicken tree. It’s the same thing. My sister’s name is Elizabeth, but we call her Libby. It’s David who started calling her that. I said, Why give her a pretty name like Elizabeth and call her Libby? Why not Beth, if there has to be a nickname?”

  “David’s your—”

  “Stepfather,” she said grimly. “I have a half brother too, by my father. There is a saying that the middle child of three has second sight. But I’m between two halves, so it may not apply to me.”

  “Two halves—”

  “Two half siblings,” she said impatiently. “I’m not sure if that really makes me a middle, since they’re both related to me and not to each other.”

  I tapped my pencil against the sketchpad, interested in the problem in spite of myself. “Because you’re in two families of two kids, and not one family of three?”

  Rowan smiled, pleased that I understood. “Yes! That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “Well, have you ever seen the future?” I asked.

  But Rowan looked away and shrugged, as though she’d lost interest. She did that, I’d learn, when she didn’t want to answer a question.

  She pointed at my sketchpad. “Were you drawing the tree?”

  “Trying to,” I said, covering the page with my arm.

  “I can’t draw,” Rowan said. “I can’t sing either. But I have a good memory. That’s what I’ll get voted in high school. Best Memory.”

  Then the rain began. The drops hit the leaves with small smacks that sounded like faint applause. Rowan pulled her hood up over her dark hair. “Time to go,” she said.

  “The chapel,” I said, pointing to it.

  Rowan glanced over her shoulder. “It’s locked.”

  I reached into my pocket and withdrew two silver keys.

  “You stole them!” she said, delighted.

  “I’m putting them back. That’s borrowing.”

  “Without asking.”

  I shrugged and Rowan laughed.

  I unlocked the chapel and pushed the door tentatively, but Rowan, shifting from one foot to the other behind me, reached over my shoulder and shoved the door open.

  Laughing, she pushed her hood back and shook out her hair.

  I unzipped my jacket. The wooden floor was bare. Even the center aisle was uncarpeted.

  There were eight pews, four on each side, put in when Jorie had the chapel renovated so it could be rented out for weddings and baptisms.

  Above the altar, there was a round window of green glass. There were two plain glass windows on either side of the chapel, the kind that came to a point at the top, like the flame of a candle or a teardrop.

  Between them was a square stained-glass window, its image the view beyond the wall. The woods in autumn colors, the trees shedding leaves. In the corner, the quicken tree with its dark red berries. Even if it weren’t the reason I’d swiped the keys, I would have gone to take a closer look, so striking it was to see a stained-glass window that was not of a saint or a familiar religious scene. The wedding at Cana. Veronica and her veil. The Good Samaritan.

  As Rowan wandered the space, I went to the window to read the plaque beneath it:

  In dear memory of Nicholas and Gabriel, the sons of Edward and Lucy Adair

  Rowan swirled her finger in the holy water font and made a face as she wiped her hand on her sweatshirt.

  “Nasty. I bet nobody ever changes that water.”

  I sat in the last pew on the left side of the chapel. In the corner were the votive candles. She picked one up and rolled it in both hands.

  “You don’t have any matches, do you?”

  “Matches? No,” I said. “Why would I?”

  “I don’t know you,” Rowan said, “so I thought I’d check.”

  Did she think I was a smoker or an arsonist? I was rehearsing the comeback when she dropped the candle in its holder and turned to me, folding her arms over her chest.

  “We should come here at night,” Rowan said. “It’s haunted.”

  I thought, We? But I only said, “Haunted?”

  Rowan nodded. “Helen, the maid who worked at Moye House a long time ago? Helen, our ancestor, spoke to the dead, and, they say, sometimes the dead still come here looking for her.”

  Rowan spoke in her husky voice and kept her eyes averted, as though listening to someone I couldn’t see or hear. I kept glancing around. We hadn’t turned the lights on—I didn’t see a light switch—and besides the rain-darkness, the afternoon was nearly over.

  I pulled my hands inside my sleeves and held on to my cuffs. The rain suddenly fell in a torrent, pounding the roof so hard that Rowan and I both looked up, alarmed.

  “Bells,” Rowan said absently, still staring at the ceiling. “People have sworn they heard the sound of a bell ringing in the woods.” Her great-grandmother Elspeth had told her that.

  “We’d better go back,” I said. “It’s getting dark.”

  She was about to say something, I think, when the door opened.

  I gasped, but Rowan, much closer, leapt back with a scream.

  A man stood there, looking at us both. He was young, not a teenager, but not long past.

  He wore jeans and a green jacket. On the jacket, in white, there was a round logo that I could not make out, though I could see the words beneath it clearly: Degare Mountain State Park.

  “Jesus, Rowan,” he said. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Evelyn asked me to come find you.”

  “I know, I know. She’s waiting for me.”

  “She already went home.”

  “She left me here?” Rowan said.

  “The babysitter had to leave. She had to get home. Come on.” He started walking.

  Rowan scowled at him, struggling to regain her dignity. “I thought you lost your driver’s license.”

  “Got it back. Now let’s go.”

  He went outside and we followed him. We went down the three steps, Rowan ahead.

  He turned around. “I can give you a ride too,” he said to me. “Where do you live?”

  “She lives here,” Rowan said.

  “Oh yeah? She lives in the woods?”

  “She lives at Moye House,” Rowan said.

  The blank look of disinterest disappeared. He looked at me again,
this time with his eyebrows raised.

  “You’re Michan’s niece?”

  I nodded shyly.

  “I’m Leo.”

  Gently test people, Janus advised the men in his HIV support group. And my mother, and me by extension, because I overheard, and I understood even then that I was one of them. When you meet someone new and they know (because you’ve told them or because it’s obvious), it’s fair to find out where you stand. Put out a hand. Reach over as if to touch their wrist. If they recoil, well, then, what’s next is up to you. Begin the work or walk away.

  Many grown-ups hid their hands in their pockets when they met me, or they crossed them behind their backs as if about to be handcuffed. Receptionists at the dentist’s office and at my school did this, and friends of my mother’s had when they still visited, before she began to look like a person with AIDS.

  I’d never tested anyone before, not my teachers and not my classmates. But I extended my hand to Leo. He was the first.

  “Adair McCrohan.”

  Leo accepted my hand. His fingers rested against my pulse. He squeezed, just slightly.

  When we let go at the same time, he did not wipe his hand on his jeans. He cleared his throat self-consciously, which told me that he knew, he understood.

  Then he turned to Rowan and scowled. “Okay, I’ve got shit to do, so let’s go.”

  “Oh, right, I’m sure,” she said. “You’re that busy.”

  “I can’t wait for the day you graduate charm school,” he said and started walking.

  At that, she laughed, surprising me.

  We walked in silence until I moved closer to whisper, “Will your brother tell that we were in the chapel?”

  “My what?” Rowan didn’t whisper, and then she laughed. “Leo’s not my brother. He’s our landlady’s son.”

  She explained that she and her mother rented the house where Leo’s grandmother had lived. Leo and his mother and sister had lived there for a while, after the divorce. Now the grandmother was in a nursing home, and they couldn’t sell the house until she died, though she’d never live there again. She, Rowan, slept in Leo’s old room.