Ghosts of the Missing Read online

  What Cassius also mentioned in his journal was that Helen offered more than folk cures for headaches and fevers. She gave to the living the names of the dead. For those who wanted to know, she offered a vision of what was to come, with a warning that the future is a book whose poems keep rearranging.

  3

  Adair

  October 1994

  Moye House vanishes in the rain. The writers who come to stay get lost if they arrive out of a storm. The driveway curves like a question mark. Yet even those not relying on maps, those who stop in Culleton to ask for directions, inevitably drive by and keep going until they accept that they’ve gone too far and must turn back.

  Those who missed Moye House on the first pass would find it on the second and come inside confused, insisting that the house had not been there fifteen minutes earlier.

  Michan glanced at me in the rearview mirror to register my reaction as he told me this. A stormy sky had chased us all the way from Long Island, but only when we entered the Hudson Valley proper had it begun to rain.

  Years later, thinking of that car ride to Moye House, about to be my new home, I’d recall the sound of the windshield wipers moving back and forth, steady and quiet, like a heartbeat. The last time I had been to Culleton it was summertime, I was four years old, and my father was still alive.

  Now I was eleven and my mother had been gone a year. Since her death, I’d been living with my grandmother, but two months past the anniversary, as though she’d been marking time, she’d made a case for her own frailty. Her heart, she said. Her hip. It was time for her to move in with her other daughter.

  My aunt, my mother’s only sister, explained that she could not take me in. She might have claimed that she and her husband couldn’t afford both the aging mother and the niece (in spite of the house in Connecticut with the freshwater pool). But she elected to be honest.

  I have to think of my own kids, she’d said.

  Leaning my head against the car window, I peered outside and saw the world suspended inside a raindrop.

  “We won’t see it, then,” I said.

  “I’m part of the place,” Michan said. “It doesn’t play tricks on me, and it won’t play tricks on you.”

  My uncle slowed for a curve on a leaf-littered road. He was reassuring me that Moye House was now my home too. But “home” for me was only a spelling word to be used in a made-up sentence: We are going home.

  Always, at my grandmother’s I’d felt like a guest. I tap-tapped on the door of the bedroom where I slept. I set my dishes gently in the sink. Even when my mother was still alive, this was so.

  “In books it’s always the bachelor uncles who take in orphans,” I said.

  “We’re a dependable lot,” Michan said agreeably. “But bachelor? Don’t write me off yet.”

  “Your birthday’s in the summer,” I said.

  “August fifteenth.”

  This meant he was twenty-seven years old the day he arrived at my grandmother’s to assume guardianship. Michan lived on the third floor of Moye House and earned his keep as a handyman, moving about the estate changing lightbulbs, hammering nails that had poked their heads above creaking floorboards, painting rooms, doing whatever was asked. Evenings, he became a resident, writing at a desk by a window that overlooked the moon garden. He was my father’s only brother.

  My mother used to remind me of his birthday, and together we’d choose a card and mail it to him. She always insisted I get one that said “Uncle” on it. Maybe she knew that her sister and mother would, in the end, not be able to cope, and she wanted Michan to have a drawerful of Hallmarks needling his conscience.

  Janus, my mother’s best friend in this world, came daily to the hospital to sit at her bedside. The dying often needed permission to leave, he said. Over and over, he had seen it. He advised my grandmother and aunt to tell her to go. Tell her that Adair would be taken care of. But they would not do it, and so he did.

  He explained this to me the broiling July afternoon of the funeral, as the mourners milled around the house with paper plates of potato salad and roast beef sandwiches, as though we were all at a picnic that had been gracelessly moved indoors. I retreated to the family room, tossing aside a Raggedy Ann doll to perch on a chair in the corner, where I felt invisible beneath the photo of my mother in a cap and gown. But he found me, Janus did. He told me that he was the one who’d sprung my mother from this life. He promised that he would do the same for me someday.

  As if triggered by the thought of the hospital, I began to cough, a lingering symptom of this past summer’s long bout of bronchitis. Lungs can feel weak, like legs. I was a veteran of rattling respiratory infections. My doctor spoke of scarring, and I imagined, with each cough, fault lines appearing in my lungs and spreading like cracks across glass.

  “I don’t care much about my birthday,” Michan said, and then added, “We can celebrate yours, if you want.”

  “Do you know when it is?” I asked.

  Michan glanced at me, not using the rearview mirror. “December 19. You were five days overdue. Cathal said they were the longest five days of his life.”

  I closed my eyes.

  When I woke, the front seat was empty and the car doors were closed. My first frantic thought was that Michan had parked the car on the side of the road and walked away.

  I shoved open my door and got out to find myself in a small parking lot where there were several other cars. The rain had stopped, but the trees were dripping.

  Michan was sitting nearby on a large tree stump, smoking a cigarette. He said nothing when I spotted him. We stared at each other.

  His face was altered, as faces are by tears. I averted my gaze and walked over. He shifted to make room for me and I sat beside him. He dropped the cigarette and ground it out.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Where we were going,” he said.

  “Moye House?” I glanced around, but there was nothing besides this parking lot, surrounded by trees. In the background, the shadow of a mountain drawn against the sky.

  “Are we waiting for it to come back from wherever it goes in the rain?” I asked.

  He half smiled. “The house is where it’s been since 1840. I think it’s 1840. Around then. A parking lot is necessary in the twentieth century, but it wasn’t in the nineteenth. It was built here, out of sight of the house.”

  Michan stood, picked up his cigarette butt and shoved it in the pocket of his jacket.

  “No littering,” he said. “It’s a five-minute walk. I can drive up and let you out, but then you’ll have to wait there while I park the car.”

  “I can walk,” I said.

  He nodded, and I could tell he approved. I’d already vowed not to be trouble.

  From the back seat, I took my schoolbag while Michan got my suitcase out of the trunk. It was the kind on wheels. He snapped the handle up and began walking, pulling it behind him. I followed him up a pitched, narrow path.

  In the aftermath of rain, Moye House glimmered, making the fine lines of the stones appear like gray and blue threads, as though the house had not been built but sewn. Two linden trees flanked the stairs that led up to the front door, which was inset so deeply that the shadows often tricked newcomers into thinking there was no door at all.

  When the house came into view, Michan kept trudging along, head down, but I paused. In books, old mansions heal the displaced children who are banished to them. Wardrobes are portals to other universes. Treasure maps are discovered in attics. A child exactly the right age to be a playmate emerges from the woodwork. For whatever the children have lost, the house gives something back.

  Here was the house where I would live until I joined its ghosts.

  Quiet hours ended at five o’clock. Michan and I entered the front hall at just past. A set of stairs curved to the second floor. Voices floated from the room on the right.

  “Front parlor,” Michan said.

  Writers often gathered there before the communal din
ner to talk, and then after dinner, to talk and drink. Michan put a hand on my shoulder, clearly planning to usher me past the open door without stopping. But someone called his name, and he cursed softly and went back to pause at the threshold. From behind him, I peeked into the room.

  Two women were sitting on opposite ends of a couch, and a man was settled in the armchair across from them. A third woman was standing. She had a white binder tucked under her arm.

  She spoke. “Michan! I was wondering if you had a chance—”

  Then she noticed me hovering beside him. She smiled. Later, I decided it was because she was used to being stared at, a woman so pretty that she seemed out of place in everyday life.

  “This is Adair,” Michan said.

  “Welcome, Adair. For some crazy reason, I thought you were coming tomorrow,” she said. “It can wait, Michan.”

  “Evelyn runs the residency office,” Michan said. “Nothing would get done without her.”

  Evelyn rolled her eyes as she strode toward us. “I’m not going to deny that.”

  As she passed by, she touched my shoulder.

  Michan gestured to the three people sitting, calling them “the residents.” All of them greeted me with cheery hellos. One of the women laughed and said, “She looks just like you. She could be your daughter.”

  Then a violent blush flooded her cheeks. The other woman writer, slim with short gray hair, stood up, her hand extended. Reluctantly, I stepped into the room and accepted the handshake. She held on longer than she needed to, not letting go until I tugged deliberately.

  Years later, she published an essay about meeting me in which she claimed that she alone greeted me and offered a touch. She either hadn’t seen Evelyn do so or dismissed it.

  Michan guided me back into the hallway. Through an open door across the hall, I spied a bookshelf and went over and looked inside the room. The two tall windows were shrouded by sheer curtains. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined the walls. Above one set of shelves, to the right, there was a small balcony with a railing made of the same dark wood.

  I loved it immediately. Up there you could pretend you were on a ship. You could pretend you were royalty, or Juliet, bad end and all.

  “The library,” Michan said.

  “No kidding,” I said, and he laughed.

  A woman called his name again, not Evelyn.

  “That’s Jorie,” Michan said. “Do you remember her at all?”

  Jorie Pearse had founded the writers’ retreat here, in its current form. I had a flash of silver hair and a sharp, striking face. But no more.

  “A little,” I said.

  “Wait here for me? I’ll be right back.” Michan turned toward the parlor.

  At first I simply breathed, and then my thinking shifted. Perhaps this was not exile after all.

  In a corner of the library was a glass-encased table that held photographs of Moye Foundry and one group photo of the workforce. I went over to a rolltop desk in another corner. But it was not a real desk. Beneath a sheet of glass lay a sheet of paper filled with the spidery handwriting of a century ago, which always puzzled me. Were they taught differently? Was it all in the pen?

  According to a small placard, this was a letter from Cassius Moye, inviting writer friends in Manhattan to stay “in the country” with him for a time. Through the glass, I touched the words, and then turned my attention to a sculpture that stood between the two tall windows.

  It was of a girl about my age. According to the inscription on the pedestal, the statue was a rendition of the girl in the classic short story “The Lost Girl” by Cassius Moye.

  The Lost Girl’s skirt swirled around her ankles, as though the wind were blowing. One braid was over her shoulder and the other down her back. She was walking. I put a hand on her bare foot, with the unaccountable urge to tell her to turn back. Uneasy, I turned away and crossed the room to the fireplace. Peering inside, I wondered if it worked.

  When I saw, or sensed, movement behind me, I straightened. The corner of your eye is a place you can go, if you choose. Enter as quietly as you can to see what has drawn near you. To see if you should run. It came again, slight as a curtain stirring. I saw a flash of green but no more, so I turned my head a fraction. A dark-haired girl was standing beside the desk where I had been a moment ago.

  A ghost, visible at this hour when the light was leaving the room? A character in the green book she held in her hand, a girl in words escaped from its pages? The Lost Girl made real and freed from her perch?

  I blinked. Yet she was dressed, as I was, in jeans and sneakers. Her long hair was not in braids but held back by two barrettes. The sculpture was in place.

  She walked toward me, straightening her glasses. From the hallway, a woman called, “Rowing! Rowing!”

  Evelyn, I thought, and I imagined the hallway as a river.

  The girl tossed something toward the couch and then ran straight at the wall of books. She veered to a library ladder I hadn’t noticed before. Swiftly, she climbed up and vaulted over the railing of the balcony, just as Evelyn put her head in the library.

  “Rowan?” she said. And then saw me. “I’m looking for my daughter. Your age? Brown hair?”

  With effort, I did not glance up at the loft. I shook my head.

  Evelyn sighed hard. “If you see her, tell her I’m looking for her.” She glided off to continue her search.

  I looked up. Rowan (if I’d heard correctly) was staring down at me in a way that reminded me of myself, studying someone or something so that I might draw it. It’s a gaze that first takes apart, separating into lines and shapes and colors, and then reassembles to restore the whole.

  “We’re cousins,” she said.

  “I don’t have any cousins here,” I said.

  My cousins were my aunt’s children, far away in Connecticut, afraid of me.

  “We’re fourth cousins,” she insisted.

  Once upon a time, she told me, there was a woman named Helen who worked as a maid here in Moye House. She was our four-times great-grandmother. Helen was the one who’d come over from Ireland.

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “I just do.” She shrugged.

  I thought I understood. This was the girl in your class the teacher calls on after three kids have already given the wrong answer and she needs to move on.

  “You don’t look like you’re dying,” Rowan said.

  “Well, I am,” I answered, affronted.

  “Nah.” She grinned.

  From the hallway, her mother called again. Rowan leaped back.

  As I waited for her to finish hiding and come down the ladder, I went over to see what she’d tossed away. She’d meant it for me. I knew that much.

  All the Woodland Creatures by Winifred Coen, illustrated by Edward Adair.

  I looked up, but the girl, Rowan, did not come back in sight. Aggravated by a game I didn’t understand, and perhaps emboldened by confusion, I set the book down on the table in front of the fireplace and went up the ladder. Carefully, I climbed over the railing to find an alcove, a reading nook. There was a loveseat and a small table and lamp. But Rowan was not there.

  Later, I’d learn about the narrow door in the paneling and the steep stairs behind it that led to the third-floor hallway. I’d learn that dashing away from her mother and hiding was a favorite trick of hers.

  I perched on the loveseat, mystified but also strangely excited at this step outside the bounds of the ordinary world. That was the first time Rowan vanished on me. The second time, Rowan did not come back. And I have grown up, waiting for her.

  4

  Edward Adair

  In the fall of 1878, Edward Adair came to stay at Moye House. An illustrator, he’d been assigned a children’s book whose story takes place in and around a forest, and the author insisted Edward join her upstate as she completed the final edits of the book. For Edward, who was twenty-six, a weekend in the country with a companion twenty years his senior did not appeal to him
, but he was new to the publishing firm and understood that the assignment was not one he could refuse.

  On his second morning upstate, Edward went into the woods alone, the only one of the current guests at Moye House willing to go for a walk on such a wet and chilly morning. He followed the directions to the mountain ash, given by a bored housekeeper. He had read “The Lost Girl” only the evening before and had not met the author yet. He understood that he might not. Cassius Moye didn’t always appear for his guests. It depended on his health.

  Edward found the tree and did a rudimentary sketch, more out of habit than anything else. Then he headed to the chapel, which interested him far more. He’d heard about the family who had taken up residence in it, a woman and her two daughters, and he thought it was like letting squirrels burrow in your attic. Edward wondered if Mr. Moye knew that if he ever wanted to evict them, he could write a letter to some bishop or other in New York. The building was still a consecrated church. Edward had been raised Catholic. He knew.

  The door was open. Cautiously, Edward moved closer until he peered in and saw a woman seated at a table in the middle of the room. She beckoned him in and asked him to close the door.

  The room was lit with fractured blue and green light from the stained-glass window. Besides the table where the widow sat, there were two neatly made beds, one in each corner. A single pew was pushed against one wall. The rest had been scavenged years ago, the woman told him. She said her name was Helen, and as he sat at the table with her, he noted that she was quite a bit older than she’d appeared from a distance.

  Edward felt a curious excitement. He tried, and failed, to keep his eyes from her daughters. Edward couldn’t decide if they were twins. One moment, he’d be certain that theirs was only a sisterly resemblance, reinforced by closeness of age and by the fact that they both wore their black hair in a single braid. The next, one or the other would look directly at him and he would decide, no, they were interchangeable.