There was watching Maggie waddle across the kitchen; there was the box turtle she found, and named, and insisted on attempting to keep in a cardboard box filled with long grass and nubby pebbles. Norman. She named it Norman.
There was the Christmas when Ed filled the house with tiny, winking lights and insisted I come downstairs with my eyes covered; there was snow piled deep and quiet in the woods, and sun turning slender cones of ice to diamond.
These are my secrets: roads branching, endlessly branching, each turn leading to a hundred others. When Sandra first came, I was tempted to share, to explain. But now I know: certain stories must remain mine, so that there is a me to remain.
Thomas wasn’t mentioned in my will. How could he be? He was by then a phantom.
It’s funny—I knew him a little less than two years. Even in living terms, that hardly amounts to anything. And in time that is not-living, in the endless, chalky sweep of eternity, which wears years to sand and blows everything back, dustlike, into void, it is nothing.
But that’s the beauty of life: time is yours to keep and to change. Just a few minutes can be sufficient to carve a new road, a new track. Just a few minutes, and the void is kept at bay. You will live forever with that new road inside of you, stretching away to a place suggested, barely, on the horizon.
For the shortest time, shorter than the shortest second’s breath, you get to stand up to infinity.
But eventually, and always, infinity wins.
Sandra is talking to herself, going on about the morning and the will in particular. She’s still delighted by the mystery of Adrienne Cadiou. I wish she would be quiet; the Walkers have exhausted me, left me with a shivery sense of discomfort, like a body gripped with fever.
“New bet,” Sandra says. “What are the chances that Minna will bed that—?”
Just then, something moves. A disturbance—a rippling feeling, a passage through spaces, like coming up to the surface when you’ve been submerged and holding your breath. For a second there is only confusion: a rush of sounds; a blur of brightness, painful and unexpected.
I think of penetration: Ed and the sound of the hyena; Thomas exhaling; a high belly, full with strangeness.
“What in the devil . . . ” Sandra’s voice is high, strained. She feels it, too. “What is that?”
And then I know, all at once, what is happening. It has happened to me before, many years ago, when Sandra first arrived.
Now comes the nausea, and a sense of swinging; then the world breaking apart, as it did when I was small and would spin and spin until I fell backward, watching everything dissolve into color.
Just like that, there it is. A third presence.
Another ghost.
The nausea subsides, leaving me gasping. Sandra lets out a mangled cry. For once in the history of her death, Sandra is struck dumb. I have a brief moment of panic: Richard Walker has, after all, come back.
But then it speaks.
“It’s dark,” she says simply. Her voice is faint, barely audible. She must be young. She is small; she takes up hardly any space. A child.
“God help us,” Sandra says.