The Painted Bridge A Novel

THIRTY-FIVE





Anna walked alone back up the stairs, through the empty dayroom, the dining room. Beyond the dining room, by the stairs to the patients’ rooms, she paused. She heard no footsteps. No sounds of crying or laughter. No rain falling indoors. Only a deep, muffled silence. She walked down the corridor, past the linen room and tried the door to the clothes store. It was unlocked. Pushing her way in, she rummaged in the pile of garments until she caught a glimpse of sea green. She pulled out her own dress and held it up, creased but intact. Hugging it against her, she slipped up the stairs.

Her door was open and the fire in the room lit. The air held a faint, aromatic smell and dried lavender flowers were scattered over the hearth. She gathered up a few and crushed them, bringing her fingers to her nose, breathing in the pungent scent. Through the window, snow was thickening the branches of the trees, piling on top of the railing to the field and the backs of the huddled sheep. “A dishonest man,” she said aloud. “A trickster.”

She undid the skirt and bodice, then stepped out of Makepeace’s black dress, kicked it away from her into a corner and put on her own. The familiar, worn velvet grew quickly warm against her skin. Filling the mug, she took a long drink of water then sat down in front of the washstand. She pulled the towel away from the mirror and looked at herself. Her hair was soft and spiky like the fur of a cat. Smoothing it down on her head with one palm, she examined her face. The bruises had faded and the scabs were gone from her forehead. She rested her fingertips in the round pale scars they had left behind, felt the bone strong and hard under the warmth of her skin.

It occurred to her that she wished that Lucas St. Clair had been among the people in the room. She wanted him to know what had happened to her, that she was of sound mind and hadn’t been broken. Anna still had the feeling that she knew him, more deeply than through the exchanges that had passed between them. That in other circumstances they could have been not Dr. St. Clair and Mrs. Palmer but man and woman, with nothing and everything between them.

He’d been nervous when he made the close-up picture of her. She wanted to see what he saw, pushing the camera so near she could smell the chemicals from inside the wooden box, had almost believed that the lens would make contact with her skin. Pulling the St. Christopher out from under her bodice as she had for the portraits, she let it hang over the neck of her dress, round and solid as a moon.

Anna leaned in to the glass. Her breath softened the reflection, misted the mirror as if she looked at an old photograph of herself, from another time. Her eyebrows were dark, her eyes clear and direct. Something had changed in them since she arrived. Something had been settled, some question answered, and it showed. Her mouth was soft. She didn’t look either like a lunatic or exactly as she had when she came to Lake House. She looked like her own older sister. Not Louisa or any of the others. Her own, wiser self.

Her eyes traveled to the silver circle that gleamed under her chin. It was luminous, the figure standing out in relief. She lifted it closer to the glass and stared at the old man walking out of the waves, bowed under the weight of the child on his shoulder. She’d worn it since the day her mother died and she had never properly seen it. It was growing, filling her field of vision, obliterating the room, the green thistles on the walls, the lingering smell of lavender. Anna felt weary. So weary she could not remain where she was. She crossed the floor and lay down on the bed.

* * *

She was in Dover. In the flint house. It was bitterly cold, the milk frozen in the jug on the breakfast table. She tested it with a spoon; the crystals were sharp and thick on her tongue, the liquid underneath watery. Their mother was in bed with a migraine and a hot brick wrapped in flannel. Amelia Newlove shouted down the stairs that the children should go out, get some fresh air. Give her some peace and quiet.

Anna thought about peace and quiet, struggling with her blue coat. About what it meant. The buttons were too big for the buttonholes and her fingers stiff. The back door was open: Louisa had gone on without her. She got one button done up and ran through the glasshouse, sniffing the dry, fragrant smell. Through the garden, holding her hands tight over her ears to keep the cold from getting inside her head. There was no wind and the air was frozen like the milk. It felt solid with cold.

She came fast down the path, slipping and sliding, the chalk layered with ice, the bushes tearing at the skin of her hands. Reached the bottom, her head rushing with the downward plunge, feeling dizzy. Inspecting the beads of blood that stood up on her palm, she put her hand to her mouth and tasted her own blood, then felt with her teeth for the tip of the thorn and pulled it out. All the time, Anna was aware of a silence. A silence that should not have been. When at last she looked up, she cried out.

The sea was solid in front of her. It was pale and stilled, shut under a lid of ice with its top turned white. It was angry underneath. Raging at the imposed stillness. She knew that. Anna was frightened. She called for Louisa and heard nothing back but her own voice dying on the air. She walked toward the sea, tested the uncertain edge through the toe of her boot, keeping just a small part of it in her sight. She dared not look to the horizon, wished she had stayed in the flint house and never seen it. It was an evil omen, like in the Bible—a sea of glass. And before the Throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal.

She hadn’t been thinking about him. She never did. He was just there. Always there. Trailing them, crying if they left him behind. Falling asleep on the sand, in a corner of the garden, anywhere. She wasn’t thinking about him.

And then she saw him. Standing on top of the chalk stack, the low one, closest to the cliff at the edge of the bay. He was there, with his spinning top in his hand. He threw the top out over the ice as if he tossed a ball. It sailed a short distance through the air, then fell and bounced and skidded on the surface. He watched it fall, observed its sliding path. Then he jumped, his face creased with smiling. He flew through the air, landed, paused for a moment as he imagined he would, as if he arrived on solid ground. He stumbled, slid half from view, slowly. Anna saw his face change, the expression turning from joy into puzzlement. He slid farther and disappeared. His hair was there for one last arrested moment, bright against the colorless matter of the sea ice. Then gone.

Anna ran along the hard strip of exposed sand, scrambled and crawled along the rocks to where he had been, farther out around the edge of the bay. The ice wasn’t solid there. It was in jagged pieces with cracks between them. She climbed down onto the largest of them, under the rock, pushed her hands down though the crack, felt the bite of the water closing on her hands. Felt their emptiness as they sought and did not find. She was shouting at the top of her voice. No sound came. After a while, the cold drove the breath from her chest; she couldn’t shout, couldn’t breathe, could only whisper. She stayed there, plunging her arms down into the water, dragging her hands through it, her fingers spread. There was nothing. Her hands were empty. Only her eyes still held him. She turned back, crawled on her hands and knees, along the beach, up the path, through the garden.

She was in bed; the roses turned gray. Her hands were raw and grazed. She couldn’t feel anything. She should have been watching. It was her fault. Every night in her dreams the sea entered the house, it filled the rooms, to the ceiling. She lived underwater, hearing nothing from the land but fragments, exploding.

In the days that followed, as the ice melted, she waited at the top of the cliff, lying on her stomach, hanging over the edge and watching. Looking for something, she didn’t know what, searching with her eyes, willing something to appear from the opaque waves, to emerge, float up, become whole again.

One morning, the old man was down on the shore, bent over and digging for worms, in his wading boots that came up to the tops of his legs, his stooped shoulders in his usual navy jersey, his long, white hair blowing out in the wind. He pushed his toe into the sand, explored with it. He kneeled down as if he was praying and stayed there as the tide turned and began to run in around him. After a long time he rose, with something in his hands.

He laid the bundle, it could have been cloth, an old coat lost in the sea, waterlogged, heavy and limp at the same time, or a dead bird, a bird that fell from the sky, he laid it over his shoulder and he walked out of the sea, past the path that adults never took and up through the cut passageway.

By the time he reached the top, Anna was waiting for him at the gate, hiding. She followed him into the house; he kicked open the front door, walked straight in, water leaking from his boots with every step. There was something on his shoulder. An arm, hanging down against his back. The top of a head. Curled hair the color of sand.

The old man reached the kitchen, took off his cap and dropped it on the table. He leaned forward and as he did so the bundle on his shoulder contorted, the head rose. Antony lifted his head and looked at her, his blind eyes open, his face blue, the features thickened.

After that, there were only noises. The ship’s bell, ringing and ringing. Louisa, crying. The sound of hammering, of nails being driven into wood, slow and somber. Adult voices. Her mother’s screams, that drowned out the sea. Antony was gone. His bowl and spoon were gone, his smocks and shoes. His singing in the morning. His name was gone. They were not allowed to speak it. Erased from the air, from their mouths. From everywhere.

* * *

Anna lay on the narrow bed for a long time, listening to the thickening silence. As the light disappeared, she stood up and went to the window, resting her elbows on the sill. On the other side of the glass, huge broken flakes still drifted downward, obscuring the boundary between the lake and the shore, blanketing the shallow mound under the sycamores. In the whiteness, the bridge had disappeared. Nothing moved but the snow.