It was the end of August, only days before classes would begin. I’d spent the last two years commuting to classes part-time at Wesleyan, what must have seemed to my mother an aimless existence, the only one of her four daughters living at home. Leanne and Sarah had stumbled upon useful and regular lives. They had graduated from college, and Leanne was engaged and working at an advertising firm in New Haven, and Sarah had married and was already pregnant and had moved into a colonial house on a cul-de-sac in Stonington, and I pictured my older sisters’ children, those destined to be born, growing up with toys we had when we were young—those Fisher-Price farms and airplanes and houses with miniature, limbless people and animals. They’d read their children the same books our mother had read to us—Sendak’s Nutshell Library, and the Little Golden Books’ The Color Kittens. They’d fulfill the promise of womanhood, slipping on their new responsibilities like pretty dresses—the traditions at the holidays, the joys of cooking and child rearing—and, unlike me, forget they were once unhappy teenagers.
My grandfather had died when I was eleven, and my grandmother had recently moved into Essex Meadows, a retirement community where she might be less alone, and free of her old house and its attendant memories. I supposed she’d wanted to force us all out by leaving, but my mother and I stayed—the two of us holdouts, believing that as long as we stayed, we were safe. But the old house, surrounded by its privet hedges and by Long Island Sound’s wide, gray presence, provided only a semblance of privacy. Since Detective Thomson had paid us another visit, my mother had become even more distracted, distant, and I noted her relief when I agreed to move away to attend school.
Though it had been five years, the murder of David Pinney, a local teenager, remained unsolved, the case open, and every so often detectives visited, and we were questioned yet again, my mother’s blanched face reflecting her irritation. I was summoned downstairs and asked to recall my memories of that summer—a time so far removed, and about which I’d talked so often, that my story seemed stolen from someone else’s memory. Detective Thomson had graying hair and only half a pointer finger on one hand. Once I’d asked him if he’d had a bit of bad luck in shop class, and he’d smiled.
“Something like that,” he’d said.
His missing digit intrigued me, and through the years we’d developed a loose sort of banter. “Did an evil witch demand it?” I’d asked, or “Were you held for ransom?” until my mother told me to stop.
This last time he came, I’d told him I felt like Cinderella, let out of the garret room to slide my foot into the proffered slipper.
“Does your mother keep you away from other people?” he’d asked me, leaning in, the buttons of his dress shirt straining.
My mother had been getting him a cup of coffee in the kitchen, and I’d almost considered playing along, whispering that I was a prisoner in my room just to see his expression, but then she came in with the cup on a saucer, and the look on her face—alarm, caution—prevented me from doing so.
Now my mother gripped the wheel of the car with white hands, and I sensed she wanted to get me to the school as quickly as possible before I changed my mind.
My great-grandfather had been an alumnus of the university where we were headed, a student of avian biology. Owing to his becoming someone famous in the field, and to the “enigmatic” quality of my photography portfolio, I’d been accepted as a transfer student. Years before, I had discovered my great-grandfather’s notebooks in my grandparents’ attic and had been intrigued—drawings on yellowed paper of various species of birds, with labeled coverts and scapulars and crowns. Among these drawings were others—landscapes that included figures standing at a remove, at the edge of a field, or a wood, their faces bearing the worrisome expression soon to become familiar to me—that of someone lost or forsaken. Along with the drawings were two slim, hardbound manuals—well-worn and filled with his penciled marginalia. They were published in 1907 by the Theosophical Society in Point Loma, California—Psychometry, Clairvoyance, and Thought-Transference, and Psychism, Ghostology, and the Astral Plane—both penned by “A Student.”