Diana
1948
Diana was ten years old when she was finally allowed to see her mother. Part of her was excited, but a bigger, noisier part was nervous. For most of her life, her mother had existed as a signature on a birthday card. An old photograph bent at the corners from constant handling. She’s very far away, people told her, but she loves you very much. If not for her aunts, she might have believed that all mothers lived very far away from their children.
As she pulled on her tights and straightened the lace on her dress, she wondered: Would her mother like her? Would she think they looked alike? Would she come home with them?
By the time she and her dad were in the car, Diana was full to the top of her head with questions. Dad had to scold her a bunch of times to stop bouncing in her seat, but she couldn’t help it. The questions were alive inside her, buzzing and bunched and bumping against her insides, making her stomach flutter.
They finally stopped in front of the biggest building Diana had ever seen. Big pots of flowers lined the long driveway all the way up to the front door. When they got out of the car, a woman in a crisp white hat and apron appeared in the doorway. She nodded at Dad and then smiled at Diana. There was lipstick on her teeth.
“She’s had a busy morning,” the woman said, “so don’t be surprised if she’s a little tired.”
A look passed between the woman and her dad that Diana couldn’t read.
“Perhaps we should come back another time,” Dad said.
Diana’s heart fell all the way to her feet. “No! You said—”
The woman waved their words away. “You’ve already made the trip.”
Dad nodded. “Yes. I suppose you’re right.” He smiled tightly at Diana. “Shall we?”
The woman stepped aside, and Dad took Diana’s hand, leading her through the big door and down a long hallway. The floors and walls and ceiling were so white they glowed. More of the same flowers from outside were stuck in vases on tables that sat between bony-looking chairs. More ladies in white hats and aprons click-clacked along the hall, carrying trays. All of them nodded at Dad, but he must not have seen them. He stared straight ahead, his grip on Diana’s hand tightening.
They passed several open doors, and Diana peered into all of them, anticipation rising and crashing each time Dad breezed past, not even slowing. She started to think this was some kind of joke, that he’d walk her around in a circle, then take her back to the car saying Now, wasn’t that fun?
But finally he slowed his pace and then stopped just short of another door. This one was shut, and a man in a white shirt and slacks sat on a stool beside it, a book spread open on his lap.
Seeing them, the man closed his book and stood. He smiled as he shook Dad’s hand. “Afternoon, Mr. Anker.”
“Afternoon, Jim.” Dad smoothed down his tie. “Good day?”
The man called Jim glanced down at Diana. His mustache twitched like a caterpillar. “Afternoon, miss.” He turned back to Dad. “Better than some, worse than others.”
Dad took a deep breath and sighed. “Okay. Thank you.”
Jim nodded and then leaned across to open the door. “Give me a holler if you need anything.”
“We’ll be fine, I’m sure.”
Yeah, Diana thought. We don’t need your mustache getting in the way.
She was practically vibrating by now, tugging on her dad’s hand until he finally stepped toward the door. She could feel her heart in her back and her throat, little drums.
Inside the room was much darker than the bright, glowy hallway, and it took a minute for Diana’s eyes to adjust. There wasn’t much—another of the bony-looking chairs with a white robe draped over the back, a bookshelf only partially filled with a browning plant on top. On one of the lower shelves, Diana spotted a pink shell. It looked out of place against the grays and browns of the rest of the room, and she was overcome with the urge to touch it.
“Bethany? Darling?”
Diana quickly turned in the direction her dad looked, to a small bed—smaller than hers at home—with white bars at the foot and head. A lump of blankets sat in the middle. But the closer she looked, she realized the lump of blankets was moving.
Dad took another step closer to the bed, releasing Diana’s hand. “I’ve brought Diana to see you. Isn’t that wonderful?”
He looked back toward Diana and waved her forward.
The woman in the bed looked nothing like the picture Diana kept beneath her pillow. Her mother was tall, with a round face and bright eyes and cheeks that pinched when she smiled. The body of the woman in the bed barely filled the length of the mattress. Her skin was pale, almost gray, and it didn’t even look like she could smile. She slowly turned her head, and when her eyes settled on Diana, they only seemed to get dimmer.
Dad nudged Diana until she croaked a timid, “Hello.”
“There,” Dad said, too chipper, “isn’t this lovely?”
Her mother shifted her shoulders, then turned away again.
***
For more than an hour, Diana sat on the edge of the bed, silent, staring mostly at her folded hands while Dad talked to her mother. He talked to her about the house, telling her about the roof that needed replacing and a new settee he’d bought for their bedroom.
“It’s quite comfortable,” he said. “I can just picture you lounging beside the window with one of your books.”
Diana stole a look at the bookshelf. She doubted her mother had picked up any of them. Again, her gaze drifted to the shell, snapping away only when a knock on the door made her jump.
Jim and his mustache slipped through the door. “Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Anker. Miss. It’s time for Mrs. Anker’s bath.”
Dad’s cheeks flushed. “Of course. We’ll just, uh…”
He nudged Diana off the bed and tried to shuffle her toward the door but was blocked by a woman pushing a wheelchair.
Dad gripped Diana’s shoulder so tightly she yelped. He shushed her and pulled her away, toward the bookshelf. Jim and the woman got on either side of the bed before the woman pulled down the mound of blankets on top of Diana’s mother, and then they bent down and tucked their arms under her shoulders.
“On three,” Jim said.
He counted—one, two, three—and then they heaved her mother up and twisted her toward the wheelchair. Diana’s breath caught. Dad clapped his hand over her mouth before she could cry out. Her mother’s legs were gone.
“It’s okay,” Dad murmured. “She’s okay.”
But her mother wasn’t okay. As Jim and the woman pushed her off the bed and into the wheelchair, her mother’s head lolled like a doll’s. The woman gently pushed her back against the chair and tucked her hair away from her face.
The woman pushed the chair toward the door, pausing just on the edge of the doorway. “Next week, Mr. Anker?”
“Next week,” Dad said, flashing her a tired smile.
Diana and her dad stood tight against the bookshelf until the sound of the wheelchair’s squeaky wheel disappeared somewhere down the hallway. He stroked Diana’s hair and sighed.
“Today was a low day,” Dad said. “Your mother will be better next time.”
Diana nodded, but she wasn’t even sure that woman was her mother. How could she be?
As he started to pull her toward the door, the glint of the shell flicked in the corner of her eye. Without thinking, she snatched it off the shelf and held it in the folds of her dress until she got in the car, where she carefully hid it in the elastic of her tights, the bulge on her hip barely visible through all the ruffles.
The entire drive home, she wondered if her mother would notice the shell missing. If she would ever notice anything at all.
***
In the days after, when anyone asked how her mother was doing, Dad answered, “Well. Very well. I’m sure we’ll have her home any day now.” The first few times she heard it, Diana questioned whether what she’d seen had been real, or if she’d dreamed up a whole nightmare mother, and her real mother—the mother in the picture—would be home soon. Then she realized: her dad was lying.
Weeks went by where, every Wednesday, Dad asked Diana if she wanted to visit her mother again, and every Wednesday, Diana said no. What began as a childish defiance that this broken woman was her mother soon became something entirely different. She carried the stolen shell with her everywhere—to school, to church, to cousins’ houses for birthdays—and soon it became a prop in her own lies about her mother.
My mother brought it back from her vacation in Hawaii.
My mother sent it to me from Brazil, where she’s living with tigers and teaching them how to fetch.
As she got older, the lies became less fantastic. She conjured memories from her imagination to share with friends and lovers—
We found it on the beach during a picnic when I was little. She wanted to make it into a necklace, but it was too heavy.
My father gave it to her on their anniversary because he said it reminded him of the pink of her lips.
—and she began to understand those first lies her father told. Telling her own lies, burying the truth, was less painful than reliving the fear, the shame, she’d felt after finally seeing her mother. Told enough times, the lies became real, and every time she looked at the shell, in a place of honor on her bedside table, the weight of her shame lessened until she barely felt it at all.
***
Her mother died when Diana was six months pregnant, more than ten years after the first and only time she visited.
“Pneumonia,” her dad told her over the phone.
In that one word she could hear the lie, but after years of practice, she pushed the suspicion away and instead asked questions about arrangements and burial, and offered to come to the house on the cape to help, which he gladly accepted.
When she packed for the trip, she tucked the pink shell in alongside her clothes and toiletries, eventually moving it from her suitcase to her handbag, where she could run her fingers over its sharp edges and conjure new memories to one day tell her child.
It wasn’t until she saw the lighthouse that she finally let herself mourn for her mother—her real mother—a woman she didn’t know and now never would.
***
Coming home was like letting out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. The house on the cape was exactly as she’d left it when she went away to college, down to her old bedroom furniture. Her dad met her at the door and fawned over her “condition,” his worry palpable in every word. Her aunts—his sisters—had already arrived and were staying in one of the guest bedrooms, he told her, prepared to be at her beck and call should need be.
Exhausted from the trip, Diana decided to go to bed before dinner. In her old room, she opened the window and breathed in the salty air. Apart from her parents’ room, hers had the best view of the lighthouse. She was sad to see the red light wasn’t on tonight; she’d been looking forward to watching its hypnotic turn, something that had always helped her sleep even on her worst days. With the gentle breeze and the melodic crash of the waves drifting through the room, she fell asleep quickly, still in her clothes, her suitcase open, the contents half-strewn on the end of the bed.
She woke what felt like seconds later, her mind groggy and stuck somewhere between sleep and awake. The room was pitch-black. Her eyes ached as they struggled to adjust to the darkness, and when the last of her dreams fell away, an uneasy feeling crept into its place. She lay stone still and held her breath. Listened. She couldn’t see a damn thing, but she felt someone in the room with her. She strained to see into the shadowy corners of the room, but everything was shapeless and dense.
The bedroom door was shut—that much she could see—but she couldn’t remember closing it. Maybe one of her aunts had after peeking in on her…
A hissing sound made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. It was like laughter, but…not. Worse, it was coming from somewhere in the room. Slightly muffled but close. She wanted to hold her belly, to cradle her child, but she didn’t dare move, imagining someone hiding under her bed or in her closet, waiting for their moment to strike.
Stop it, she told herself. You’re being ridiculous.
It was probably just the trees rustling outside. Or a bird stuck in the eaves. It always happened in the late summer—birds would build their nests in the gutters and along the slope of the roof, only to get stuck in the nooks and cracks. As a child, she’d watched her dad pull several dead starlings from the gaps, their legs stiff and brittle as twigs.
Finally, heart skipping, she forced herself to sit up, almost daring the thing in the shadows to come for her. From this angle, she could see a light under her door. She flew out of bed and flung the door open, bathing her room with the soft glow of the hallway lamp. Nothing looked out of place, but she couldn’t be sure.
Too wired now to go back to bed, she started toward the stairs. Her stomach growled, and the baby inside her stretched.
“Okay,” she cooed. “Okay. Let’s see what’s left in the kitchen.”
At the edge of the landing, she heard voices. Something about their hushed tone made her pause.
“—warned him.”
“—could have been spared all this scandal.”
It was her aunts. She peered around the side of the wall, where the corner of the sitting room was just visible. Her aunts sat opposite each other, brandy glasses sitting on the edge of a game of checkers they hadn’t touched.
Scandal?
Diana leaned against the wall, listening.
“You don’t believe all that tosh about a curse, do you?” Aunt Maggie asked.
Aunt Kate sipped from her glass. “Of course not. It’s like we’ve always said. The family is damaged, and Beth was the worst of them.”
“God rest her soul,” Maggie muttered, an afterthought.
Kate continued, “To find her in the bath like that—”
“Horrendous.”
“—drowned.” Kate’s tone suggested horrified reverence, but the way her eyes lit up, it was like she almost enjoyed it. “Philip should sue.”
Diana had stopped breathing. She gripped the corner of the wall so tight she left scratches in the wallpaper. Drowned?
Maggie shook her head. “He’s been through enough. The last thing he needs is to publicize his wife’s suicide. Besides, there’s Diana to think of. Poor thing has had a go of it, hasn’t she?”
A sharp ache started in the back of Diana’s head and radiated forward. This is a dream, she told herself. I’m still asleep and this is a horrible dream.
Kate made a noncommittal noise. Nudged a red checker forward a square.
“A baby will be good for her. For all of them. Something precious to focus their efforts on.”
“If you say so,” Kate said.
Maggie frowned. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.” She smiled. Swirled her drink. “I’m sure everything will be just peachy.”
“Convincing.”
Kate chuckled, then her smile slowly fell. “I just wonder if…” She shook her head. “Phil can talk around it all he likes, but there’s something wrong with his wife’s family. Beth’s suicide is tragic, but it’s hardly an isolated incident.” She leaned across the table. “Did you know she was in the room when her mother threw herself out the bedroom window? Just upstairs. Philip sleeps in that room. The same bed maybe.”
“You’re just being macabre.”
“It’s true!”
Maggie shushed her, and they glanced up at the stairwell. Diana dipped back behind the wall, heart pounding.
“It’s true,” Kate repeated, softer. “And then there’s her grandmother. People say she disappeared, but who knows?”
“Diana is perfectly stable.”
“Is she?” Kate tutted. “You don’t remember all those stories she told about her mother? I’m still fielding questions about Beth’s supposed sojourns to Brazil.”
Diana’s face burned.
Kate continued, “I’m just saying there’s a pattern.”
A curse, Diana thought.
She couldn’t listen to any more. Leaning on the wall for support, she walked back to her bedroom, not bothering to hide her footsteps. Let them hear. She hoped they were ashamed.
Back in her bedroom, the hissing sound returned. She opened up the closet and looked under the bed. She looked in desk drawers and glanced down at the rocks beneath the window, swallowing hard as Kate’s comment about her grandmother replayed itself. Finally she followed the sound to her suitcase. She pulled out her clothes, scattering them on the floor, the sound growing louder and less like a muffled hissing and more a rush, like a hard wind.
The sound was coming from her shell.
It was cold in her hands, sending chills up her body. Still, she held it up to her ear, and as the roar of the ocean washed over her, a voice drifted beneath the current. Soon, it promised her. Soon it will be your turn.
***
In the end, Diana decided not to attend her mother’s funeral. It hurt her father when she told him, but she couldn’t stand the thought of sitting beside her aunts, knowing what they’d said about her. About her family. Worse, she couldn’t shake the feeling that it might be true.
Besides, she’d already mourned for her mother. A long time ago, in that small, gray room.
Instead, she went down to the beach, kicked her shoes off, and dug her toes in the sand. The cool feel of it was a relief to her swollen, achy feet. She wished she could bury herself in it. She blamed the stress of travel, of her aunts’ gossip, but ever since she arrived at the cape, it was like a thousand tiny weights had been tied around her arms and legs and neck, slowly at first, then all at once.
And the voice.
Diana heard it constantly now, not just from her mother’s shell, but from the gaps under the doors and in the heating grates, following her from room to room. She’d hoped coming down here, where the roar of the water might be enough to drown out the voice, would give her some relief, but it was like the voice was louder here. Clearer. A girl, whose demands shifted from despair to anger and back, like whiplash. She was in pain, and she wanted Diana to share in it.
The sun beat down from a cloudless sky, and soon the sand was almost too hot to walk on. Sweat pooled in the small of her back and between her legs. The skin of her belly tingled, stretched and itchy, and it was like she could feel her blood pumping through her, the veins in her hands ropy and purple.
The water would make it better, she thought.
But had it been her thought? Or was it another intrusion?
She rubbed the back of her neck, flinching at the beginnings of a sunburn.
There were no intrusions, she decided. No voice. No girl. It was just her. Her mother’s daughter.
Just need to cool off a little, she thought.
It didn’t occur to her to take off her clothes, and by the time the thought crossed her mind, she flicked it away, a pest. Water splashed up her body, soaked her dress, her skin, her hair, and it was like the blood stopped in her veins. Her mind and her muscles melted, and everything stilled. She sank under the surface, the silence a balm. She could stay under here forever.
But then the feeling from her bedroom returned. There was someone here with her. She opened her eyes, but the sting of the water was too much. Panic fluttered in her chest as she struggled to get her feet beneath her. The silt was loose, and her feet slipped over and over. She got turned over, and disoriented, she clawed blindly at anything she could get her hands on until finally her face broke the surface and she sucked in a deep breath.
The invisible weights were too much, though, and she dipped back beneath the waves just as she started to catch her breath. This time she took no comfort in the silence. It was heavy. Thick. And then she felt fingers scratching down her legs and across her feet. They reached up her dress to her belly and squeezed.
Her body reacted on instinct, twisting out of the reach of the probing hands. She clawed and kicked, and when she finally reached shallow water, she crawled her way back to shore, body weak and shaking. As she dragged herself farther up the beach, something sharp stabbed into her thigh. She rolled over, sand coating her face and inside her mouth, and dug the thing out.
Her mother’s shell.
Angry tears burned her eyes.
I will not become this, she thought. I will not give in to the voices that tell me the only solace is at the bottom of the ocean. My children will not tell stories to forget me.
Wincing at the pain in her thigh and belly, she pushed herself to standing and warily stepped toward the water. With the little strength she had, Diana threw the shell as far into the water as she could. As she followed it through the air, instead of relief, she only felt heavy. An anchor tied around her neck.
She would carry it forever, if that was what it took, but this was where it all stopped. Whatever curse had happened upon her family would end with Diana.