A bird with a yellow chest flies from one branch to another, on the run from something. The ferns have left little wet handprints on my jeans.
Now it’s like this: you look at yourself in the mirror and watch your reflection take off a mask. You look hard at all the wrongness in this new face, you look hard at the ways that wrongness has shaped it, and you have to decide if this new face is something you can live with.
If you decide no, you dissolve into yourself. If you decide yes, a small thing inside you is set free.
34.
In the Mansion, there are animals all around us. I’ve seen the scurry of whiskered rats, snakes in the grass, possums with spindly white tails stalking the backyard after dark. I’ve seen birds in the trees, the ones that sit hunched on the broad low branches, buzzards or something related. There are alive things in the house too. I keep hearing the tick tick tick of nails on the floor, a scraping in the walls. It’s only a matter of time before one gets stuck inside.
In Charlestown, Ms. Neuman was always setting out cages for mice. Once they were in the cages, she would feed them cheddar cheese with poison inside. If Marcus and I found a trapped mouse sniffing at the bars, we carried the cage outside and let it go.
In the living room, when a raccoon gets stuck inside the trap door, Nelson says it will make a great tool for an experiment. The four of us stand around the closed trap door, having been drawn into the room by the sound of the animal’s thrashing. I can feel the raccoon racing around beneath us. I can feel it slamming against the walls. A pulse, an aliveness, rises from the floor.
“You probably aren’t aware that the history of animal experimentation goes back to the Greeks,” Nelson tells us, sensing our hesitation. “That the rhesus monkey helped find a vaccine for polio? That heart valve replacement surgery was tested on dogs?”
I can see that Nelson thinks of the Mansion as a kind of Hospital, its inhabitants the patients, and I do not need another Hospital or another doctor trying to pry his way inside. I’ve had it with scientific inquiry.
“We should let it go,” I say.
“Yes,” says Marcus, who has always had sympathy for trapped things. “I vote to let it go too.”
“Who said anything about voting?” Nelson stands on the trap door and crosses his arms, unwilling to give up his prize. Earlier he was outside. His pants are streaked with fresh mud. “You just got here. You don’t know how things work.”
Somehow, in the middle of all this, Darcie continues with her remembering.
“I was in a basement,” she says, loud enough to get our attention. We stop arguing about what to do with the raccoon and look at her. She’s pulling feathers out of her wings. “I was living down there. I couldn’t get away. I was tied to something.”
“When?” I ask her. I don’t know if she means the basement downstairs or some other place, if she was in a basement before Nelson found her on the side of the road in Cordova. The raccoon is whining now, a shrill plea.
“Sometime before. I think.” Darcie’s eyes widen and she looks like she’s about to tell us more, but then she stops and sinks down into the velvet chair, her wings bursting over the arms. She’s holding fistfuls of feathers. There are bald spots on the ridges of her wings.
“See!” Nelson claps his hands. “She’s remembering. She’s getting fully cured.”
Marcus and I look at each other. We’re not sure we like this idea of what it means to be cured.
“Oh no,” Darcie cries. She drops the feathers and pushes her face into her hands. “Oh no.”
A Real-Life Ghost Story, I think. That’s what she’s remembering now.
The animal claws around inside the trap door. The floorboards shudder. Darcie runs upstairs and into the bathroom. We chase after her and find her sitting in the rusted tub and rubbing her arms like she’s washing herself, even though there’s no water.
“Don’t kill it,” she says when she sees us huddled in the doorway. She leans back in the tub and rests her black-soled feet on the porcelain edge. “Don’t you dare kill it.”
“But what about progress?” Nelson asks.
She closes her eyes and shakes her head. For the moment she is the one with the power.
We decide to leave the raccoon alone for now.
*
That night, there are no games. No drinking, no copping and robbing, no hiding, no tunnel. Instead we vanish into our separate corners. Darcie stays in the bathroom, pretending to wash herself in the tub. Nelson retreats into the attic and soon after I hear the bowling ball rolling across the floor, the clatter of pins. The raccoon stays locked inside the trap door, thrashing. Marcus and I are in our room. I’m reading on the mattress. He’s sitting silent on the floor.
My body is leaden. I am sleeping more and dreaming less. I am unsure if this is progress. The waist of my jeans has started digging into my stomach, leaving behind a mark that looks like a second bellybutton.
We don’t speak. We don’t draw. We don’t play hide-and-go-seek or grand obituary, at least not aloud. I know we’re not supposed to use our own names for obituaries, but silently I do them for my eight-year-old self and my Stop & Shop self and the self that is still locked up in the Hospital. All the little selves I want to kill and bury deep.
In the middle of the night, I wake up alone. The room is dark. From the cold of the mattress, I know Marcus is gone. I push open the window and climb into the sill. I drink in the mineral smell of the night. The moon is a white sphere in the sky. I watch the light shift, the pattern of shadows on the ground. I think about how easy it would be for me and Marcus to slip out of this house and away.