The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

I can almost recognize where I am. I hurry forward, into the thinning patch that is opening before me.

It’s the stoop of a town house, that much I know. There’s no one about on the street. The block is deserted and silent. I squint, trying to make out more details of the house. I walk faster, picking my skirts up in my fists, then dashing up to the stoop to stare at the building’s face.

It’s my house.

“But how did I . . .” I trail off.

I spin about where I’m standing, but there’s no one there, and just outside the periphery of the front stoop, the fog is just as thick.

I scratch in my curls.

“I got turned around,” I explain to myself. “In the fog, I got turned around someways.”

I stand on the stoop for a long minute, chewing my lip. The truth is, I’m feeling awfully tired. It was a long night, after all. All that Madeira. Perhaps it would be wiser to go inside and rest. Perhaps I should look for the cameo in my room, and rest, and collect my thoughts, and perhaps I can bribe Winston to carry a message to Herschel, to meet me at a theater we’ve gone to before, where we can sit in a corner and kiss and no one cares. Winston carries messages for me sometimes. Winston excels at never letting on, when he sees things. Willful blindness is almost as good as trust.

I mount the steps to the house and try the door.

It’s locked. I don’t have my key, of course, but someone’s always home.

I rap on the door with my fist first, and when that doesn’t work, I take hold of the brass knocker and give it a good loud knock knock knock.

I wait, listening for the telltale shuffle of Lottie’s feet on the stairs.

There’s no answer.

I try again. Knock. Knock. Knock.

The house has a dead sound, as though it were completely empty, not only of people, but of furniture, and all hint of life.

“Hello?” I shout up to the windows. “Ed?”

My brother’s room looks over the street, since my parents are less concerned with the modesty of an eight-year-old boy than with their potentially wayward daughters. If he’s upstairs playing or at his lessons, he should certainly hear me.

“Ed! I’m locked out!” I scream at the top of my lungs.

The house makes no reply.

Muttering, I hurry down the front steps and around the side alley, through the gate to the kitchen garden in back. I exhale a long sigh of relief when I spy Winston chopping wood next to the chicken coop. Mother likes to keep chickens because it reminds her of when she was a girl, in Connecticut. But it’d be cheaper just to buy them.

“Winston?” I call out.

Winston doesn’t hear me. He lifts the ax overhead with an air of barely restrained rage that even I can see, and seeing anything about him is difficult, as the fog is thicker back here. He brings it down with a grunt, and the log splits. Winston’s saving up money to buy his wife, who labors as a housemaid for a man at my father’s bank. She costs ninety dollars. So far he’s saved seventy-one.

He hoists it out of the stump underneath, and lifts it overhead again, and brings it down with a thwack. Over and over and over and over and over again. Like Sisyphus, pushing the boulder up the hill. The woodpile never seems to get smaller. The chopped pile never seems to get larger. The chopping of wood will never end for a man of all work with an indentured baby daughter and an enslaved wife.

“Winston?” I try again.

I edge nearer, and see that it’s not the fog that’s making Winston hard to see. Winston is hard to see because Winston almost doesn’t seem to be fully there. He lifts the ax overhead, and I can see through the ax head to the fence beyond. He brings it down, and the curve of Winston’s back blends in with the chicken coop beyond. My eyes widen.