The Book of Speculation: A Novel

I hammer and wrestle the twisted metal back into the semblance of a working gutter. The brackets and screws are still attached, as though the roof itself shifted. An hour’s worth of hammering and bending and shredding my hands, and the gutter is ready to be reattached to the eave. The wood splinters under the first screw. I adjust, try again, but it gives way once more, sending a chunk careening to the ground. Third and fourth attempts only loosen shingles and further disintegrate the eave. The gutter falls, beginning an outline around a soon-to-be-dead house. The roof is rotting. This is something I should have known to fix years ago, should have known needed maintaining, but no one told me. I was left a house and a sister, with no instructions on either. And the cliff creeps closer.

We used to run down it, Enola and I, feet sinking deep. Her hand in mine, we pulled each other to the shore, gape-mouthed and howling. Each leap had us falling, counting seconds before we touched ground. Knees bent we’d land, the earth catching us and giving way, sliding down to the sea. Each step chewed at the houses around us, mine.

I would take every one of those steps back.

I let the gutter lie. Hop over it to go up the step, tug the damned door that never opens. Into the living room. Pick up the phone. Call Alice.

“It’s me.”

“You skipped out,” she says. It’s hard to tell how she feels about that.

“I’m sorry,” I say, to be safe. “Do you mind if I come by early? Is that okay? I can’t be here right now.”





6


It had been long years since the house in Krommeskill had known a baby. It was a place of clouds, hidden in the Hudson’s haze and ruled by the strict and righteous hand of Sarah Visser—Grandmother Visser.

The trouble with Evangeline started long before Amos saw her in a lightning field. The trouble was that she’d been born.

“Naught is right with you,” Grandmother Visser said upon examining Evangeline. “But I shall fix you.” Her heavy cheeks shook. The baby was peculiar. She stared at those who held her from eyes like her father’s, a strange man who’d tapped at her mother’s window on nights when mist came off the river. Eyes colored like copper and dead dandelions, eyes in which Grandmother Visser saw her daughter’s fall from grace.

Amelia Visser, the child’s mother, was sixteen when the man visited her window. He breathed otherness, and a secret light burned inside him, spilling out when he spoke. His skin had a faint yellow hue like brass or gold, his hair was sooty black, his features were both boy and man, and infinitely interesting to Amelia.

The rapping sound had been gentle. Amelia drew back the curtain on those eyes the color of weathered metal. She opened the window.

His voice, a warm humming. “I’ve seen you at the river. May I watch you swim on the morrow?” Softness can compel, a voice can mesmerize, as did this man’s quiet lilt.

Amelia felt him when she swam—in the tall grass and shadows of the woods, in the water itself because it tickled and made her skin come alive. Upon returning from the river Amelia discovered a strange shell left on her windowsill, a gift from the man. Smooth and hard with a sharp tail and spiny legs that ended in claws she dared not touch. She caressed the shell’s fragile dome. It was curved and shaped like a horse’s shoe. She left her window open with the drapes thrown wide. When her mother asked her why, Amelia answered, “For the brass-skinned man with the copper eyes,” and had the backs of her hands switched for fibbing.

A kiss on the cheek was followed by a kiss on the lips, until what was wild in the man bled into Amelia. Her eyes became feral, her laughter uncontrolled, and her temper impossible. Her belly grew full.

Her mother nailed the window shut.

In months a sharp pain grew in Amelia’s stomach. With the pain came blood. With blood came fear, with fear came loneliness—from loneliness came a most remarkable thing: a daughter.

When Evangeline suckled she drew life from her mother along with the milk, growing fat and round while Amelia wasted. She became drawn, waxen, and cried tears enough to wash the linens. She rose from her bed only once a day and would not let the baby from her side. In Evangeline’s eyes Amelia saw the man who had visited her until summer had burned into fall.

Though Amelia withered from pining, Grandmother Visser saw only the price of sin and her negligence. She saw the face of a seducing man smiling out of a child and swore to teach the sin from Evangeline, to raise her better than she had her daughter. While Amelia lay dying and Evangeline’s eyes were closed like a new chick, Grandmother Visser took the baby.

“I will wash you of the stain,” she said, her voice clipped by abrupt Dutch English. Her broad bosom was covered by the stiff black wool of mourning—the modest attire she’d chosen to wear since the long-ago death of her husband, Johannes Visser, a good and righteous man. The cloth chafed Evangeline’s skin, but she slept on until shocked by frigid washtub water.

“I myself shall baptize you.”

Evangeline cried, but was silenced by wash water. Grandmother Visser held the infant’s head and murmured prayers, rocking. With each verse she pushed Evangeline’s head further below the murky surface.

“We repent our sins and fear new sin’s approach, we clean ourselves in grace’s water.”

She pried Evangeline’s mouth open with a finger, for the root of sin dwelled in the heart and the belly. Water flooded in—enough to drown.