“I was here last summer,” she said, flipping through a magazine about trout. “I came back for the rest. It’s restful. You know. And Don’s such a nice guy. Isn’t he?”
“Don’s great. But last summer,” I persisted—because it was gnawing at me, the casual presence of everyone, their unlikely presence, their stubborn persistence—“how’d you find it in the first place?”
“Just the website,” she said, and put down the trout magazine in favor of a yellowing copy of Cat Fancy.
As she reached for it one of her long sleeves rode up, and I saw a red scar along the wrist.
BURKE CAME TO HELP with Lena’s lessons; he’s her tutor in botany. They planted seeds in a doll-sized greenhouse we put together from a kit, Burke bent over beside her, avuncular and kindly. The greenhouse has rows of light-green pots maybe two inches in diameter, a line of small lightbulbs and transparent plastic walls. It sits on our windowsill.
Lena had said she wanted to grow a beanstalk, so Burke brought her several kinds of beans to plant. He cautioned her the stalk might not be large enough to climb on; it might not reach the sky. She nodded and told him that was just as well, because she didn’t want to meet a giant or a giantess, she didn’t want to hear a cannibal giant say “Fee, fi, fo, fum. I smell the blood of an Englishman.”
She isn’t an Englishman, she said to Burke, but she still thought the giant might want her, even if she’s a girl and an American. She didn’t want to hear that giant talk about smelling blood.
Burke patted her head.
“I promise, sweetie,” he said, “there won’t be any giants speaking to you from this beanstalk.”
As soon as he said it his face went pale. He stood there for a few seconds and sat down heavily on my bed, leaned over and stuck his head between his knees.
I was taken aback—Burke had seemed more solid and self-assured lately, seemed to require less comforting.
“Are you OK?” I asked, leaning over him, laying my hand against his back and taking it off self-consciously.
He looked up and nodded.
“Sorry,” he said. “Panic-attack type . . . sorry. I’m fine. Heading back to my room.”
Lena cocked her head, confused; I watched the door close behind him.
“Here,” I said, picking up a library picture book on plants, “let’s read this part about how seeds germinate. Most seeds contain an embryo and food package . . .”
IT OCCURRED TO ME, reading about the transmigration of souls, that my early assumption of some kind of nonhuman power or supernatural omniscience had been impressively unfounded. It might have been just a person’s thoughts that had got loose, the memories or knowledge base of, say, some overeducated, possibly unhinged individual whose stream of consciousness flowed along carrying the debris of a lifetime. Could be that Lena caught the ruminations of a scientist or scholar.
Maybe this is a ghost story after all.
Or maybe the information that’s now carried by so many frequencies just caught in her as it passed, lodged in her body—the live feed of a humble taxpayer somewhere, erudite but alive. Maybe some unseen field around my infant simply filtered particles from the immense cloud of content carried by those millions of waves that pass through us all the time.
THE SISTERS FROM Vermont, it turns out, aren’t sisters from Vermont: I’m bad at pegging guests’ identities. Their teeth aren’t even protruding, just large and blocky, and they’re cousins from somewhere on the mid-Atlantic coast near Baltimore. Both of them are named Linda, a name that’s common in their extended family; they’re in their early fifties, friendly, good-natured and hearty. One is an administrator at a university while the other is retired from her career at a famous aquarium in Florida where marine animals do tricks for crowds.
When the Lindas went to town for groceries today we hitched a ride with them. They dropped us off at the library so Lena could exchange her picture books—one of which is too young for her, about a bear who’s a splendid friend, the other of which turned out to feature cows rising in armed revolt. (They hold roughly drawn Uzis in their hooves; this puzzled Lena’s literal mind due to the cows’ lack of opposable thumbs.) To answer the question of the guests who don’t leave I have to be more outgoing than I have been until now, so I’m trying.