The Writing on the Wall A Novel

The Writing on the Wall A Novel - By W. D. Wetherell



One



HAUNTED house, haunted woman, haunted country, haunted hills.

The match was perfect enough to make Vera smile for the first time that summer, the first time all year. In the dark, stooping, she reached for the key her sister had left under the lilac closest to the porch. The moon found it before her hand did, a nickel with a silvery nose. The house groaned when she applied it to the lock, but halfheartedly, as if it were tired of scaring, having done it for so many years. A creaking floorboard under her shoe, a film of cobweb against her cheek, the garlic smell of wood rot, and then she was in, there was nothing the house could do but accept her, saving its scarier tricks for later.

Jeannie had told her where the switch was for electricity, but she had neglected to write it down, and she was too exhausted to search. Exhausted from decisions, not big ones, nothing major, but the dozens of minor ones needed to get herself onto the plane in Denver, fly across the continent, drive north three hours from Boston and find her way here. She could sleep now—for the first time in months her heart sent permission to her head. She groped her way down the entrance hall, found moonlight again, used it to climb steep stairs to the bedrooms. The largest had a mattress on the floor, a light cotton blanket, and, centered on the pillow, Jeannie’s welcoming little joke, a Snickers bar, the kind they always begged for as kids.

It was Jeannie’s vacation house—their “shack” they were calling it, Tom’s fixer-upper, a place they could go to when the pressures of the city got too great. Built in 1919, it had stood empty for the past sixteen years, taxes had gone unpaid, and the town was more than happy to sell it to them cheap. It was a forgotten kind of place, with no ski areas nearby to jack up prices, no pretty lakes, just a shallow stream running toward Canada which gave Tom visions of learning how to fish. Our “retreat” was the other term they used, without saying what they were retreating from, though Vera knew that the news of the world hit them hard. Terrorists wouldn’t find them there, even if they took New York— and in the meantime, Tom could do his fishing, Jeannie could have a garden, and anyone who needed solace more than luxury was welcome to borrow it anytime they wanted.

“You can have it for two weeks,” Jeannie told her when she called in June. “Three weeks. Right into August if that’s what you need. We won’t be able to get up there until after Paris and maybe not even then.”

“I’d like to stay thirty days,” Vera said. The precision was deliberate.

“There’s no furniture yet. The yard is a jungle, I haven’t touched the garden, and the vines look like they’re gobbling the house. But it’s interesting enough inside. Whoever built it must have had lots of birds-eye maple, because the floorboards, when we peeled the linoleum off, turned out to be gorgeous. Will Dan be coming?”

“No. Just me.”

“He must be busy with his contracting again, good for him.”

That was always Jeannie’s way, to supply the white lie herself.

“I can’t emphasize that enough,” she said, when the silence went on a little too long. “How much work it all needs. The worst is the walls. They’re plaster, original probably, but the wallpaper is straight from hell. The front rooms have something that resembles knotty pine, and whoever lived there in the Sixties put up something in the hall that looks like what wedding presents come wrapped in, this hideous white velvet with blood-colored veins. Stripping it off is going to be a major ordeal.”

“Let me help.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Let me do it.”

It surprised her, the quick and powerful way the asking surged through her throat.

“Strip the wallpaper?”

“I’m terrible with tools, but I’m sure I can do it.”

“It would take months.”

“I’ll work hard.”

“Uh, Vera? It isn’t easy.”

“I know what you’re thinking, that Dan is the carpenter and I’m just a teacher. But I’m not so klutzy I can’t strip wallpaper.”

“We’ve already talked to someone in town, an old French Canadian who does anything.”

Surprising, how much she needed Jeannie’s yes—enough so she brought out her most powerful argument, the one there was no refusing.

“It will do me good. To have something like that to focus on. It’s what I need right now. I’ll do a good job for you, I promise.”

Jeannie was six years younger—she’d never had to beg her before. Quickly, almost too quickly, she reversed course and said yes. Why of course she could help, that would be wonderful. They could leave scrapers for her and putty knives and stripping solution and a stepladder and a big garbage can to put scraps in and rubber gloves and bandages in case she nicked herself and plenty of food and wine, and it would all be ready for her when she arrived, she could go right to work.

“You won’t have to worry about a thing while you’re there.

Really—not a thing. It’s grunt work though, really messy. How strong are your wrists?”

“Once I finish I can hang the new wallpaper. Have you picked any out?”

“After stripping? That’s double the work.”

“Downstairs then. You can hire your Frenchman to do upstairs.”

“There’s a website with old Victorian wallpaper and we found a soft peach color that complements the floor. Tom’s doing the math on how much we need. But we’ll order it and have it waiting with everything else.”

“Thank you, Jeannie. Jeannie? Really, thank you.”

“You know how much aggravation you’ll be saving us? I’ll send you directions. Basically, you drive north on the interstate, then fall off the map. Don’t argue with me, but we insist on paying for your flight ... That merger I told you about? It’s back on again, so I have to be going.”

She said goodbye abruptly, without asking about Cassie, and the absence of that kept Vera holding the phone for a long minute after she hung up. “She’s well, thanks,” she said to the mouthpiece. As well as can be expected. If she can stand thirty days then so can I.

Maybe that’s what the chocolate on the pillow was for—an apology, a gesture of support. Certainly Jeannie had kept her promise about supplies. In the darkness, boxes and cartons made a maze she had to thread her way through before going upstairs. She glanced at the walls on the way up, traced her hand along the paper, but it was too dark to really see. Beside the candy was a penlight she used to find the bathroom; after undressing, she fell against the mattress as if she’d been pushed. Two layers of exhaustion worked on her, and the upper one, the one that came from the flight and long drive, was wonderfully smothering, the way it kept the bottom layer from having its way. She fell asleep quickly, dreamed of silly things, then, well before dawn, woke up to moonlight touching her face.

It burned, that was the odd thing, white as it was. She lay there until it touched her throat, then, restless, wrapped the cotton blanket around her shoulders and ventured carefully out into the hall. The walls weren’t square and reliable, but slanted at unexpected angles, like baffles, keeping her from walking straight more than a few steps at a time. One turn brought her to a door with frosted glass in the upper panels. A closet, she decided, but when she opened it she came to a pool of moonlight so dense and liquid she stepped back in alarm.

There she found a little balcony, a platform big enough for a single chair, set above the porch just below. Someone must have built it to have a quiet spot where they could be alone over the hubbub of visitors, and this pleased her, to have discovered one of the house’s secrets so quickly. The railing was wobbly and rotted, but it gave her enough confidence to take the three steps needed to peer down.

The ground mist rose into the moonlight, and toward the top were milky tongues that licked in toward the house. Back home the mist hardly ever rose above the sage, but here it seemed brewed from an enormous kettle, smelling of greenness and the lightest spice of fir. An enormous pine tree fronted the porch, but the fog hid its trunk and only the needles were visible, like pins holding the mist up. Jeannie had told her about the wild pea vines, and it was true, they climbed the porch and coiled around the railings, not eating the house so much as holding it ready to eat, shifting and turning it to just the right angle.

She could hear Tom’s trout stream across the road, a purposeful rushing, and an owl, very distant, calling to a hoarser one that roosted much closer. She shivered as she listened, her new kind of shivering that had nothing to do with the damp. In March, she had been hurled out from the world by a single phone call and she wasn’t down yet. Even on the flight east, after she had said goodbye to Dan, taken her seat, closed her eyes during takeoff. The plane didn’t need to climb, she was already up there, and the entire flight had seemed a gradual downward slant, and yet never did she land. Even landing it didn’t land. Even in Boston she wasn’t down. And now here she was, climbing porches in the moonlight, on the way up again, her landing further off than ever.

She had spent the flight staring out the window, though her neighbors, absorbed in the movie, glanced sideways at her and frowned. It was an exceptionally clear day, the view should have been wonderful, and yet it was marred by something it took her most of the flight to understand. The land below looked tired and old—there was a graying agent in the air creating the effect of an exhausted giant sleeping with its mouth open; the lakes, its eyes, rheumy and clouded; the highway, its lips, crusted over with spittle; its hands, the valleys, listless and pale. The longer she stared, the more coma-like the effect seemed, and it made her angry, enough so she wanted to ring a bell or trip an alarm. “Wake up Detroit!” she wanted to shout, when the pilot mentioned it was under them. “Wake up Syracuse!” The pilot came back on to warn of turbulence, but the only thing shaking was her heart.

She turned around to take the house in, what she could see above the mist. Behind the porch the eaves rose at an angle so sharp it suggested a fierce-looking steeple. Under the edges drooped a trim of gingerbread so rotten it was impossible to understand why it hadn’t dropped off. The single window had only one shutter, hanging out at a lopsided angle from the glass. Now, as she watched, it seemed aware of her presence, because, with no wind stirring, it creaked sideways on its hinges and smacked the window with a bang.

Excellent, she decided—for the second time that night she nearly smiled. Show me more of this, use your best tricks, frighten me out of my numbness, though to find numbness is exactly why I’ve come. Generations had lived and died there, the house reached back into time, so why shouldn’t it be haunted, if only by rusty hinges, rotten joists, corroded pipes. Dan would have loved tackling these, he should have been the one to come. She could bring nothing to bear on the house except slow mindless work with her fingers, wrists, and arms, and yet maybe it was this that would make the house friendlier, coax it into her favor, calm all its fret.

She remained on the secret platform until she started shivering again, this time from cold. With it came exhaustion, and it was the deeper layer this time, the one that sleep could do nothing against. She went back inside to her mattress, pressed with her slipper until it slid away from the moonlight, and into the darkness let herself fall.

The difference in time zones worked in her favor—she slept much later than she did at home. The sun touched her face as the moon had, then moved across the floor to the nearest wall. When its light filled the room she got up, searched through her suitcase for a sweatshirt, tugged it down over her jeans. A midnight arrival was no way to start with the house. It needed to be approached in daylight, from a feeling of energy and strength. She went downstairs determined not to look at anything—she pressed her hands to her eyes like blinders—and then she was outside crossing the yard to the road, walking purposefully toward the sun.

It was a modern enough road, with two smooth lanes and absolutely no traffic. A hundred yards past the house a sign announced the village was three miles off, and beyond that on the crest of a little rise stood a smaller green sign that she fixed on as her goal. When I touch it I’ll turn around.

The fog lifted through the trees, and the energy of this made the leaves toss sideways and dance. From the wet grass on either side of the road came a cinnamon scent from flowers that were new to her, with spiky blossoms only partially unfurled. There was an iron smell, too, from the mud in the gullies. Black-eyed Susans grew everywhere, with purple nettles and tough-looking gorse. Flowers had always been her joy in life, wildflowers especially, so this, she decided, is where she would come during breaks in work.

The sign turned out to be farther away than it looked. She walked for another ten minutes, and what she found when she got there surprised her considerably.

You are standing on the 45th parallel it read, in dignified bronze script. Halfway between the Equator and the North Pole.

And this time she did smile—tentatively, surprised at herself, but finally letting it have its way. What amused her was to think that Jeannie’s house lay a quarter mile closer to the Arctic than it did the tropics, and how this must explain the feeling, so strong when she arrived during the night, of sliding toward the planet’s edge.

Irony was good for her—joined with the sunshine it sharpened her vision so she could see things plain. She turned and faced the direction of the house. It lay centered in a frame made by the steep hill behind it and the winding trout stream across the road—bigger than it seemed up close, boxier, uglier, squatting with a hasty, improvised look on its overgrown scrub of an acre, despite the fact it had endured there almost a century. The sharp eaves she had stood under during the night were plainly visible splitting the house in two, only now it seemed less like a steeple than a stubby guided missile ready to be launched from the metal gambrel of the roof. The siding, with the sun slanting against it, was a chocolate color fading toward leather, though many boards were in the process of dropping off. The chimneys, all three of them, tilted toward the roadside, and the one that sagged furthest pressed against a rusty TV antenna that was almost bent in half.

Lower, partly obscured by trees, was the porch, with screens blackened from mildew and totally opaque. The bay windows, bulging out on either side, seemed like the turrets of a battleship ready to blast anything approaching from the road. And that was what the house suggested, seen from the distance—great fragility and great strength, so she simultaneously felt surprise that it was there in the first place and certainty that it had been there forever.

“Quaint,” Jeannie had called it, when all other adjectives failed. But it was the exact opposite of quaint.

Well beyond the house, just before the road curved out of sight, was a smaller, even shabbier, house, but it was too far away to tell if it was occupied. The hill directly behind Jeannie’s was steep and rocky, cutting off any view toward the west, but the hills on the sides sloped more gently, so perhaps a sunset sometimes managed to sneak through. The fields around the house were open, but overgrown and swampy, and it was impossible to tell whether anyone cared after them. The forest started at the base of the hill, with thicker, more serious looking trees than the handful clustered around the house.

There was something Western in the landscape that surprised her, at least if you faded out the green. Not so much where she and Dan lived, but the high northern tier of Montana where they had gone on camping trips when Cassie was little. Jeannie had warned her that she would find the sky small and claustrophobic compared to what she was used to, but it wasn’t that way at all, and to the northeast, across the stream, the hills uncoiled toward Canada, widening the horizon. In walking back to the house she noticed two parallel tracks worn deep into the meadow grass, reminding her of trails left by pioneers back on the prairies. Had wagon wheels cut them? She taught middle school science, not history, but she was reasonably sure the settlers who came here first had not used covered wagons.

She approached the house from the rear this time, pushing her way through the wild honeysuckle separating it from the meadow, scaring up some robins. There were shabby outbuildings, one filled with soggy black firewood, the other looking like a cross between a chicken coop and a barn. Swallow nests drooped in pendants from the rafters, but they were dry and sterile looking, fit for ghost birds, not live ones. Both buildings, in Jeannie’s plans, were doomed to immediate demolition. A neglected stone wall marked the back of the property, now just a rock pile, nothing crafted, and the frost had long since toppled the upper boulders to the ground.

Other than these, there wasn’t much to discover. Strands of barbed wire, tarry shingles blown off the roof, a mushy baseball. She stepped on something sharper than a rock, reached down, picked up a wedge-shaped spike scaled in rust. There was a path worn into the ground, with bleached-out grass, and it led right to the wall and not one step farther. Someone had once walked there, walked there often, but had never gone beyond the edge of the property, though the meadow behind it ran for another hundred yards before the forest. This saddened her—the sense of limits, of obedience, of self-imposed circumscription.

A fence led around toward the front. A picket fence, the slats gray and peeling, only not a picket fence, because the slats were pressed tight together. She struggled to remember the right term. Stockade? A stockade fence? Stockade as in fortress? Stockade as in prison? Again, as always now, she stepped upon the booby trap of words.

Only one tree grew in back, an enormous box elder. From the thickest branch hung a tire swing that must have dated from the 1940s, so old and petrified was its rubber. Vera, reaching, was surprised to have it actually sway. They had hung a tire swing like that for Cassie from the branch of their plum—the solid remembrance of pushing came into her arms, the moment she saw it. Cassie had been reluctant to climb on that first time, she had an only child’s sense of prudence, but after that it became her favorite plaything for the whole of one summer, especially after sunset when she liked to swing back and forth kicking her legs out at the fireflies that flashed near her face.

“Higher Mommy!” she would yell—the little girl’s classic plea. “Higher!”

Good memory? Terrible memory? She wasn’t sure how to tell them apart anymore. Any walk she could find, any path, circled back to facing that.

In heading toward the back door, swerving sideways to get around a midden heap of rusty cans, she came upon a surprise. Poppies, tall ones, as brilliantly red as it was possible to imagine, their blossoms touching heads. They didn’t grow wild, someone must have once planted them, and she felt comforted by this, the evidence of a loving human presence. And there was better than that, too. Behind the poppies was a cluster of blueberry bushes taller than her head, and around these, as a kind of barrier, thorny blackberries, with so much fruit the vines sagged. She ate some of the plumpest, filled her cupped hands with more, then and only then began to think of breakfast.

Stone steps led up to the kitchen. It was dark inside—past ten now, and the sun hadn’t penetrated. A huge sink, zinc or cast iron, took up most of one wall, and past it was a gas range that must have been new in 1950. Hotpoint read the raised lettering on front, though both t's were twisted. This was the one room in the house that wasn’t wallpapered, but painted. The wainscoting, running up from the linoleum, looked greasy and dusty at the same time, and above it the walls were the color of raw liver. A piece of stovepipe stuck out from the ceiling like a fat cigar, but there was nothing under it other than a black scar on the linoleum where a woodstove had once rested. The room smelled of something she couldn’t identify, but seemed part shoe polish, part charcoal, part skunk.

The only thing new was the refrigerator, which Jeannie had insisted on installing ahead of her visit. She had crammed it full of food and then piled even more on top. Half was the junk food they loved as girls, half was the organic that was Jeannie’s new passion; Vera ended up having soy yogurt and a cellophane-wrapped cupcake for breakfast.

The bathroom was wedged in a corner behind flimsy walls. Vera, despite herself, knocked on the door before she went in— the door with heart-shaped openings cut in the panels to let heat flow through. The wallpaper inside had shiny red and green stripes like Christmas wrapping, but it was peeling and didn’t look like it would be hard to strip. There was no tub or shower, which Jeannie had apologized for a dozen times over, but the hose worked out in the yard, and, if she felt adventurous, there was always the stream across the road for skinny-dipping or splashing.

The kitchen will be my base camp, Vera decided. I’ll keep it neat and organized and not worry about the chaos everywhere else. Once breakfast was over she started upon an inspection tour of the rest of downstairs. And it was really very simple, at least as regards the basic layout.

The hall, the central hallway along which she had groped her way the night before, ran all the way from the kitchen to the front entrance. The stairs climbed one wall—they looked even steeper and narrower than they had in the dark, and most of the banister was missing. Three rooms opened off one side of the hall, two off the other side, each reached by its own door. On the west, front to back, was the main parlor, then a sewing room or den, then a smaller back parlor with boarded-up windows. On the east was a foyer with brass pegs, then a narrow closet, then a dining room that was the largest, most pleasant room in the house, with windows that ran all the way up from the floor and an old-fashioned ceiling fan that, upon her entrance, began stiffly spinning, as if showing off what it could do.

This was the geography, it was easy enough to understand, and on her second inspection she turned her attention to the details. The floors were as beautiful as Jeannie claimed—birds-eye maple that gleamed satin in the morning light. Transom windows were cut in the tops of the doors, and the one in the dining room was stained glass. The windows, old as they were, looked sturdy and formidable, with filigree trim around the sashes that matched the gingerbread outside.

These were the highlights, the little touches that had convinced Jeannie to buy. “Everything’s horrid after that,” she said on the phone, and she hadn’t been exaggerating. Water stains on the ceilings expanded outwards in urine-colored rings. Plastic sheeting had been tacked to the doors to make up for gaps caused by the house’s settling. A mirror framed by a toilet seat dominated the back parlor, along with a Mickey Mouse clock with the eyes gouged out. The curtains, what were left of them, hung like shrouds. Cobwebs lay thick in the corners, mice droppings littered the floor, and everything seemed possessed by the kind of cold that, having nothing to do with temperature, remained impervious to the sun.

Fireplaces would have helped, working fireplaces, but the one she found in the front parlor had collapsed into a shapeless mound. Lichen covered the stone—stalked cups, yellow nodules, rosettes of greenish-gray. The grate was still there, but in place of logs was a damp, cradle-shaped slurry where squirrels or chipmunks had once made their nests.

That left the wallpaper—the wallpaper she had been trying her best not to worry about before examining all the rest. Even with Jeannie’s warning, it was hard to look at without shuddering. The rooms on the left of the hall were covered with a thick brown paper that was meant to imitate pine, complete with knots and grain, while the rooms on the right had a paper that was even thicker, a faded white velvet with red-pink squiggles that suggested frosting. It was hung badly—seams split apart from each other and hardened pimples of glue bubbled up in the cracks. Horizontal strips had been pasted on as patches above the radiators and baseboards, but the bottoms hadn’t been trimmed, so in places the velvet dangled against the floor like a trollop’s dirty skirt.

Jeannie had no information whatsoever about the former owners. The house had been empty for years before the town stepped in, squatters had apparently lived there before that, and like every abandoned home along the border it was said to have been a hiding place for drugs.

“So we’re back in the Sixties, whoever papered it,” Jeannie had said. “I picture her in—what were those awful slippers called? Mules? I picture her in purple mules, her hair up in curlers, reading women’s magazines about the suburbs and how knotty pine was all the rage. That’s half of her. The other half is someone who never had a fancy wedding and hung the velvet in revenge.”

Vera wasn’t sure Jeannie’s profile was right. It wasn’t a frustrated housewife she sensed, but someone brassier, bolder, a woman trying to break out. Maybe the walls had been falling apart, and the paper had been meant as a desperate cover-up or glue. Maybe she had known how ugly the paper was, hung it anyway as a mordant joke. Maybe a man had done the knotty pine, a woman the wedding cake, and after long hours of arguing the wallpaper represented a compromise, the house split in half.

She finished her inspection tour in the dining room. Approaching the window, noticing a two-inch piece of paper that curled away from the wall like a wilted leaf, she reached up and pulled as hard as she could on its edge. This happened fast, impulsively, and yet for a second her fingers imagined the strip peeling off all the way down to the bottom of the wall, lifting the strip next to it, then the one beside that, then the rest of the paper in the room, and then the other rooms, too—imagined, in her foolishness, that with one mighty, satisfying, god-like tug all the paper in the house would come off in her hand.

This is not what happened. The little rind of paper immediately ripped, taking a chunk of wall plaster with it, so, on that first touch, she had already damaged what she had pledged to protect.

Slower. She took a deep breath. Slower! She nodded to herself, then, frowning, to the wall. This couldn’t be rushed, shouldn’t be rushed, wouldn’t be rushed. The task would determine the speed, she wouldn’t dictate, and in any case, the slower the job the better for her.

As for supplies, the tools she needed to work with, Jeannie had gone a little nuts. The hardware store in town had been contacted, a delivery arranged, and everything that could possibly be of use in separating wallpaper from walls had been deposited in the front parlor in a massive pile. Stepladders, scrapers, putty knives, work gloves, buckets, sponges, mops and brooms, cotton rags, bristled brushes. This was low-tech stuff, easy to identify once she began picking through the pile, but there were also chemical things to use for stripping, powders packed in cartons and liquids in plastic jugs. In one box, once she tugged the padding out, was something that looked like a leaf-blower with a stubby snout. A steamer? She wasn’t sure, but it looked dangerous and cranky; she closed the box and shoved it to the side.

There was more. A huge radio, the kind you might see at a construction site, armored in yellow rubber. A first-aid kit, with extra bandages. Yardsticks and rulers. A page torn from the local phone book with the names and numbers of contractors to call in case she needed help.

In a separate, neater pile, stacked on end like the pipes of an organ, were the rolls of wallpaper Jeannie had ordered online. There seemed to be a huge number of these—she wondered if Tom had made a mistake in his calculations. The wrapping made it hard to see what was inside, but the exposed edges revealed that it was indeed the soft peach color Jeannie had described.

She decided to start by stripping the foyer—the smallest room in the house. Finish there and she would have a minor victory to build on. After that she could tackle the front parlor, the room with the most sun, come out again to do the hall, zigzag to the sewing room and back parlor, then finish with the dining room.

No reason to delay. She went around opening the windows first, or at least trying to, their sashes were so old and swollen. The radio she propped up on the remains of the fireplace, fiddling with the dial until she came upon a station from Canada playing French music—easy listening, since she didn’t understand a word. From the supply pile she selected a five-inch-wide putty knife, deciding she would start with the simplest tool and see how far she got with that.

A good part of the foyer was taken up by the front door. To its left, the wall was only one strip wide—a perfect place to start. The putty knife, with its fat grip, felt awkward in her hand, and she kept twisting it around trying to find the right balance. Dan was the artist with tools; she had always been helpless with them, and even the simple labs she did with her eighth-graders offered her all kinds of opportunities to mess up.

Did the wallpaper sense that? Did it know her weakness? In school, she made up for her clumsiness with humor, but the wallpaper would not be charmed by smiles or corny jokes.

It was the knotty pine paper—it looked as thick and unpeelable as wood—but there was a weak spot where the strip met the door frame and overlapped like a loose flap of skin. The one tip Dan had given her was to always start at the top near the ceiling and work down, so gravity helped with the peeling and the strips fell to the floor of their own weight. She reached—the edge was just wide enough she could get her fingers around it. As a girl, shopping with her mother, the butcher would lean over the counter and hand her a slice of bologna as a treat, and she would go off by herself to the produce section and carefully peel off the rind. Pulling the first strip of paper was like that, easy and satisfying, though it was disappointing that only the overlapped edge came off, not the paper that was glued.

She went to fetch the stepladder, picked a spot where the wall met the ceiling in a shallow crevice. The putty knife was sharp— she held it edgewise and sawed until there was a spot where the blade could gain purchase and lift. She did this gently, but at an angle that was far too acute, so the blade dug into the plaster. The trick seemed to be holding it at a flatter angle to the wall, more like a spatula than a knife. By doing so, she was able to get under the edge and pry, but, after a second’s worth of tension, only a nickel-sized piece of paper broke away. She watched it flutter down past the ladder to the floor, feeling both triumph and despair.

The good news was that the sliver of paper, in dropping, had created a slightly larger edge, a slightly larger vulnerability. She flattened the scraper to the plaster, twisted her wrist sideways as far as it would go, pushed to the left, then, when there was enough tension against the blade, lifted firmly outward. This time a bigger piece came off, a quarter instead of a nickel, but again she had gouged the plaster and she was still very far from getting the knack.

“It’s either going to be easy or f*cking impossible,” Dan told her, and it was obvious now that it wasn’t going to be easy. Whoever had originally glued the paper had spread it on thick, and the decades had made it even tougher, more resin-like, so the paper clung to the wall for dear life. By concentrating, sawing to get an edge, scraping to get underneath, using her fingernails, she could lift off nickels and sometimes quarters and occasionally a silver dollar, but the pieces fell off individually, they couldn’t persuade adjoining pieces to follow them, let alone entire strips.

The top third she did on the ladder, the middle standing close to the wall, the bottom third on her knees. She cut her wrist, dust watered up her eyes, and the muscles in her forearms felt tight as cord. Still, she had done it, her first strip—its woodsy looking duff lay at her feet. Thirty minutes for one narrow strip. To do the rest of the house would take thirty years.

But just having that one strip off seemed a huge improvement—the plaster was a soft linen color, and having it exposed was like adding a strip of daylight to the gloom. The next strip she tackled, on the left side of the door, was even harder, but she tried not to take it personally—the maddeningly stubborn malevolence of certain impossibly hateful bits. She would be edging the scraper along, making real progress, getting under an inch, an inch and a half, even two inches, when suddenly the blade would skip off a hardened bubble of glue or an unusually tough corner, and nothing would come off, so instead of scraping she would have to use the putty knife as a chisel. Even then some spots resisted. The parts of the paper that were meant to resemble knots turned out to be knotty, as if whoever had manufactured the paper had stirred in bark, and she quickly grew to hate these petrified dark spots most of all.

Even with this she managed to clear the strip off in twenty-three minutes, improvement enough for a ludicrous moment of pride. She noticed something this time she had missed earlier— traces of old wallpaper that the last person to strip the walls, the Sixties woman responsible for the knotty pine, hadn’t completely scraped off. Small as these pieces were, they were layered three thick, and wondering about them made her feel like an archeologist. The bottom layer was surely the original wallpaper pasted on in 1919 when the house was new. Whoever had bought the house next, instead of scraping off the original wallpaper, had just papered over it, and then some years later, a new owner, equally lazy, had pasted over that, so the walls must have been looking thick and lumpy by the time the Sixties owner—who was beginning to seem like a real hero to her—took the bull by the horns and scraped off everything down to bare plaster, or at least everything but these leftover, layered pieces.

It took extra effort, scraping these off. The upper layer, the one that must have gone on in the Forties, was a drab green color, and the layer under that, probably from the Thirties, was a cheap Depression mustard, but the one beneath that, the original 1919 paper, was a faded, feminine and very delicate peach color not all that different than what Jeannie had picked out for her restoration. There wasn’t much left of this, just those bottommost traces, but it was enough to convince her that, go back far enough, someone had loved the house after all. Certainly, of the four papers ever hung there, it clung tightest, most faithfully to the walls.

She worked for another hour, this time on the wall opposite the door, then, with her arms aching, decided it was time to allow herself a break. Jeannie had stocked the refrigerator with vitamin waters, organic lemonade and soy chocolate milk, but she ignored these and boiled tea water on the stove. She took the mug back to the parlor, cleared a spot amid the supplies, rummaged until she found the box she was looking for, sat herself down to read.

Even with the improvement it was going to take forever to strip the walls. In the box was a powdered remover you mixed with water and applied to the wallpaper with rags or a sponge. The directions said to begin by “scoring” the paper, which she was reasonably sure meant scratching x’s that would allow the solution to penetrate. It must have been extraordinarily strong stuff, because the directions suggested wearing rubber gloves during application and covering your eyes. There were darker warnings below that—birth defects, in using this product, were known to occur, at least in California.

Any combination of words and phrases could trip her up now, it didn’t take something as stark as “birth defects.” And what kind of defects were they talking about anyway? Physical defects? Mental defects? Moral defects? There was more than one kind, why didn’t they spell them out? Use this product and your baby might be born without arms. Use this product and your son might develop Asperger’s. Use this product, use it repeatedly, and your daughter might grow up not knowing right from wrong.

She could blame herself for a lot of things, but not that— nineteen years ago she had not been stripping wallpaper with poison powders. Even now she was reluctant to use it. She went back out to the kitchen, filled a bucket, came back, shook some powder in, sloshed it around with a rag, then, after making a small x with her putty knife, wiped the slurry white of it across a small section of foyer wall. The directions said to wait fifteen minutes before scraping, so she worked along the ceiling first, then climbed back down the ladder to see if the stuff actually helped.

It did and it didn’t. The treated paper was much softer, easier to scrape, only the smell was horrible, enough to make her gag. Dan had warned her that in the old days they used horsehair in plaster, and wetting it would bring out the smell—only there seemed to be goat hair mixed in, too, goat droppings, goat piss. The strips that came off were a soggy mess that immediately stuck to the floor, so she would end up having to scrape that, too, doubling the work.

No shortcuts then—every inch she would peel by hand. She worked the rest of the afternoon, determined to finish the foyer before quitting, though it was late into the evening before the final strip came off. The scraps formed a dusty pyramid she kicked toward the door, too tired to do anything more. Her fingers and wrists were numb—her knuckles looked worked on by a grater. She went outside to the yard, found the hose Jeannie had told her about, took off her clothes, turned the faucet on full strength, then, bracing herself for the cold, blasted off the papery bits caught in her hair.

Once she toweled off and dressed again, she walked back through the yard to the old stone wall. She was too late for the sunset—there wasn’t much left now except a purple-edged cloud. A cloud like that back in the Rockies would mean a thunderstorm—and soon, but here the air seemed too soft to support anything that flashy. To the south toward the village arced a pinkish seam that may have come from streetlights, but back the other way, toward the neighboring house and Canada, there were no lights showing whatsoever.

She fixed hot dogs and corn muffins for dinner. The electricity worked now, but she found a kerosene lantern in the pantry and it felt more appropriate to use that. She busied herself upstairs arranging her clothes on the bedroom floor in some semblance of order, then slid the mattress farther away from the window so the moonlight wouldn’t wake her again. The layout of the rooms upstairs was even simpler than downstairs—two bedrooms and a small bathroom grouped around the lopsided craziness of the hall.

She took the lamp, explored the bedroom next to hers, and immediately came upon another of the house’s secrets. There was a closet in the middle of the wall, and when she opened it, stuck in the lamp, she could see it ran the entire length of the house. She wasn’t sure, the light wasn’t quite strong enough, but it seemed to end in a small, Alice-in-Wonderland-type hole. Where could it lead? It would open out from the house, not back into the hall. Was there a shed there? Had there once been an attached barn? Why would anyone use a closet to exit the house? Her opening the door must have disturbed the air flow, because a soft panting sound started up at the tunnel’s far end. “Be still!” she commanded, in her best teacher’s voice, and immediately the sound stopped.

As tired as she was, the core knot of restlessness had its way with her—she woke up at midnight just as she had the first night. Once again, she went out onto the balcony over the porch. Again the shutter began flapping, but she expected that now, it was probably caused by her weight on the planks. With less mist, the moonlight was purer, and the house threw out shadows so fang-like and vicious they looked make-believe.

The house enjoyed its distortions, but there was one that was genuine. Little motes of chartreuse danced up and down over the lawn, none of them managing to make it higher than the porch, but startling her all the same. Fireflies—it was late in the season for them—and they seemed bigger than the ones at home and many degrees brighter.

She had an impulse to duck, watching them. It was odd, they were nowhere near her head, but she felt that she must immediately duck. One summer when Cassie was seven, the fireflies had been unusually thick, and they brought her outside to show her how to capture them in a jar. Cassie didn’t want to do this—she already hated any kind of cruelty to animals, even though they promised to immediately release them. Instead, she ran inside to her room, came back out again holding something hidden behind her back. When she had their attention, she brought it out, her tremendous surprise.

A lite stick, a chemical lite stick she had been given on Halloween and had kept hidden in her bedroom ever since. She shook it back and forth now the way the instructions said, and when the light started glowing it was exactly the same chartreuse color as the fireflies. She held it out to them and waved it back and forth like she was conducting their dance, laughing in joy.

The memory of Cassie’s lite stick came back to Vera so vividly it was almost staggering—again, she felt thankful for the railing. But it was cold and she felt more than dizziness centered in her stomach, so she wanted to lean over and clutch herself, clutch herself hard. She felt tears forming close to the surface ready to come spilling out—useless tears, sentimental tears, tears that weren’t deep enough to help. She didn’t let herself bend to them— she made the hard little grimace that was enough to hold them in. Later she could cry. Later when the tears came deeper. Later when they could do her some good.

She changed strategy in the morning. With the foyer stripped, she had planned to start on the front parlor, but on her way there, walking down the hall, she decided to test the velvet wallpaper with a scraper to see if it would come off any easier than the knotty pine. Once she got going, it was impossible to stop, even though the velvet turned out to be a much tougher proposition. With the knotty pine paper, she could sometimes manage to scrape off four- or five-inch pieces and occasionally be rewarded with a foot-long peel. With the velvet, she was lucky to pry off an inch at a time, and it was all about niggling, chipping, trying not to curse.

She put the radio on—the Quebec station with its soft j’adores and je t’aimes. After a while, she listened to the walls more than to the music, the coaxing sounds made by her scraper. Tinny scratches meant a stubborn spot; sandy whiskings meant a piece that could be lifted and peeled. With the foyer, she had worked from top to bottom, but here in the hall it was easier just to start in the middle and follow the path of least resistance. She began to think of the cleared areas as maps—here a map of Italy, here a map of Spain. I’ll take a break and come back and expand Italy, she told herself. After lunch I’ll double Spain.

She had thought her attitude might be more relaxed on the second day, but she had to work hard on not regarding the wallpaper as her enemy. To balance this, the walls became increasingly her friends. They were smooth underneath the paper and remarkably unblemished—their linen color was clean and inviting, of an era before cheap ugliness was born. Stripping the paper hurt her fingers, nails, and wrists, but the walls didn’t hurt at all, not by stinging, not by cutting, not by reminding. They were beautifully blank in that respect, therapeutically blank. They were doing exactly what she hoped.

Of course the walls weren’t perfect in that respect. Just because they carried no memories didn’t mean memories didn’t come. At the worst moments, when her arms started aching and her forehead dripped sweat, she began wishing she had someone to help her, and that naturally led her to think about Cassie who was so good at any kind of work requiring delicacy and patience. Organization, too—she was a great organizer, with assembly lines her specialty. Baking cookies with the Girl Scouts? An assembly line, assigning each of her friends a different task. Puppies needing their baths? Mom to dip, Dan to lather, Cassie to rinse and dry, the squirming puppies passed hand to hand until they were immaculate.

Cassie would be a pro at wallpapering. During high school she had helped Dan in the summers—she was on her way to becoming a skilled carpenter if she managed to stay interested. In their town, very early, the divide became apparent between young people who would go on to college and those who would work as hairdressers and mechanics. Cassie had friends in both groups, which was hard; she was always trying to find a middle way between futures, and this led her to considering the military. She was too restless to sit in college for four years, at least right away, and she was too ambitious to join the other girls who had already dropped out.

Two years in the National Guard, she decided—they had gone on a picnic and she was very solemn about breaking the news.

Dan had been more surprised than she had been—he barely managed to control his grimace. “We’re very proud,” he mumbled.

Cassie smiled, or tried to. “I’ll fight forest fires and help with floods,” she said. “I’ll do my two years, and then since I love animals I’ll apply to veterinary school at State.”

She wasn’t the first in the family to be a soldier. Dan’s father fought on Okinawa, then entered Hiroshima three days after the bombing; he and Cassie, in his last years, had grown very close. Her dad, Cassie’s other grandfather, was drafted in the Fifties and sent to Germany. Elvis Presley was in his company, and bought all the men poodles they could give to their girlfriends. That was how his two years had gone—Lowenbrau, frauleins, and fun. He took Russian lessons, but only so he could say the words “I surrender” to the first Soviet soldier he encountered if invasion ever came.

A joke, his army years. And now, in his granddaughter, the joke had turned serious.

That was Cassie—organized and efficient. Dan, on the other hand, would be no help whatsoever when it came to stripping. He would storm in, roll his sleeves up, start hacking away at the paper, anxious to get it over with as fast as possible. Leaky pipes, sagging joists, flapping shutters—those were the kinds of repairs he enjoyed making. “I need a man’s job,” he would say, making sure he winked. And she wondered if maybe he was onto something there. She knew it was wrong to even think in those terms anymore, but there was something feminine about stripping wallpaper that appealed to her greatly. Not feminine in a girly-girly sense, but something deeper, so she too found what her friends said they found in taking up knitting, mending, or canning. Solace, or something close to it. Being in touch with the old ways and finding in them peace.

I have wallpaper for comfort, she told herself. Dan has lies.

Harsh of her, unfair, but it’s how she thought of things now. One second she would be concentrating on the latest, most stubborn piece of wallpaper, the boot of Italy or the north half of Britain, scraping away as if she didn’t have any other concern in life but that—concentrating, squinting, probing—and then suddenly the paper would lift off, and in the brief vacuum before she started on the next piece the thought would jump out at her seemingly from nowhere. My husband is held captive by lies.

People had different ways to cope with pain, she understood that as well as anyone, and if Dan had decided to pop lies to get him through the months leading up to the trial, then fine, she almost envied him, and in any case they wouldn’t hold him forever, he was too smart for that, he had too much sense. For now, it helped him, words like “duty,” and “honor” and “patriotism,” and the gruffly unctuous types who swarmed around him with those and similar words always on their lips.

Thinking of him made her feel guilty—she had kept her cell phone off ever since she arrived, and there was no other way he or Jeannie could contact her. Postcards and letters of course, the old ways, and she promised herself to write some when she had time. Her goal was to finish the white velvet half of the hall before the day was over, and by working straight through until dusk she managed everything but a final strip. She gathered up the scraps in her arms, carried them outside to the backyard, started a fire. Each scrap still held a residue of glue, so they burned very fast, and by the time she carried out another armload the first batch was already reduced to ashes.

It was clear out, less humid. Crickets were noisy in the warmth, frogs croaked out in the meadow, but instead of the owls she had heard the first two nights came the warbly keen of coyotes.

She walked around to the front of the house to hear better— in the darkness, she almost bumped into the car, the rental car she had parked there the first night and then forgotten. Jeannie had told her about a general store in the village, a library with free Internet, but she was too absorbed in her work to break away, and the thought of meeting anyone, engaging in small talk, did not appeal to her either.

“Maybe I’ll take a break when I’m halfway done,” she had told Jeannie on the phone when they first made plans. “I’ll drive to some museums or state parks.”

Even over the phone she could see Jeannie’s eyebrows shoot up. “Museums? Parks? Up there? You’ve got to be kidding!”

There was enough beauty right there if she wanted it. Jeannie had stocked the pantry with another of her affectionate jokes— the cheap sangria they had pretended to like when they were teenagers. She poured some in her tea mug and brought it outside, laying down on the weeds near the dying remnants of the fire, her head propped against a rusty lawn chair that must have been new in 1960. By staring straight overhead she could make out the summer triangle: Vega, Altair and Cygnet the Swan, its neck pointing north, its wings flapping open toward lesser, fainter stars she didn’t have names for. They shone brighter than they did at home, which surprised her, since she always pictured Eastern skies lit garishly by shopping plazas and malls.

There were no malls here—the stars, after her second mug of wine, seemed close enough to stroke. She taught an astronomy section in science, hosting star parties with a telescope so her students could take turns peering up at Saturn or Mars. She wondered where those boys and girls were now, the eighth graders she had last year, the seventh graders who would have her in the fall. It was only eight o’clock back home, she could picture them wrapped in towels at swimming pools or sitting on the grass in the twilight watching their dads play softball, talking among themselves about the coming year.

You having Mrs. Savino next year for science? She’s nice, you’ll really like her as long as you do your work. You having Mrs. Savino next year for science? She so used to be nice, but she’s grumpy all the time now. You having Mrs. Savino next year for science? It was weird, really weird, but last year in fourth period she suddenly turned toward the blackboard, covered her face in her hands, and began like almost to sob.