Violet

10

I knew that Lily worried about me, wondering if I was sick. She complained a lot that I was too pale and tried to make me eat all the time, even if I didn’t feel hungry. She said that I was dark around the eyes, too, and tried to make Aunt Clara take me to the doctor, just in case I had an iron deficiency, but that wasn’t why my eyes had dark circles. I knew exactly why I looked like I did: I didn’t sleep at night.

I wasn’t tossing and turning and thinking about Mama and Papa, like I had done right after K2, but I had discovered that I could get a lot more done at Crescent Hill if I used the night. First of all, it was quiet, so no one interrupted me or told me that I didn’t see what I saw, which I absolutely did. I knew that Lily was scared, but it was still really annoying when she kept telling me that what I said wasn’t true—especially since she knew that it was but had just decided not to believe me because it made things easier for her. At night, though, when I was alone, I could spend as much time as I wanted with the animals, and with the old lady, too. I would go from room to room and let the smoky tendrils touch me. Sometimes it tickled, but mostly it felt like a draft of air. Sometimes they came with feelings, like being outside in the wilderness, or swimming in a stream. Sometimes I felt the jungle, too, spreading out around me, with scents and colors and lots of green.

What I felt depended on the animal, and I liked spending time with the bear, the fox, and the raven in my room the most, because they reminded me of the woods around the lake house, where Mama, Lily, and I used to go berry picking. When I closed my eyes and let their smoke touch me, I remembered the scent of the thick moss and the raindrops gathering on the spruce branches. I remembered the taste of ripe berries, too, the sweet pangs of flavor in my mouth and, later, how we would put the berries in a large pot with sugar and make jam. Fresh bread with butter and jam was the best thing I knew when I was little.

I still didn’t know what the animals wanted from me, though, or why they reached out for me every time I came into a room, but the pebbles in my brain became louder all the time, and I thought that if only I spent some time around them, sooner or later I’d figure out what it was they wanted me to do.

The old woman was different. After the first day, I only ever saw her in the dining room, where she seemed to stay almost all the time. She didn’t say anything, but just shuffled around and smiled and winked. She seemed very friendly except for when she was not. Sometimes, when I went in there, she just stood frozen under the moose head with her mouth wide open, as if she were screaming, although there was no sound. She looked very, very scary when she was like that: Her eyes stared into nothing and her skin looked very blue. When I looked into her open mouth, all I could see was black.

The woman didn’t have any smoke, and she was also different from the animals in that she wasn’t mounted on a branch or hanging on a wall. She could move around mostly as she wanted, as if her smoke had become solid somehow, making her look like she had in life. I wasn’t stupid, so I figured she must be Cecilia Lawrence, who had gifted the house to Aunt Clara. It could be Miss Lawrence’s sister, too, but I didn’t think so, because every time my aunt was in the same room as the ghost, the old woman would pull a face or become very ugly. I didn’t think Miss Lawrence’s sister had ever met Aunt Clara, but Miss Lawrence had, and maybe she wasn’t happy with what my aunt had done—or not done—to the house.

I wondered if the old woman, too, wanted something from me.

The one who definitely wanted something was the man at the bottom of the garden. Every time I went outside or looked out the window, he was there, waving his arms and shouting, even though I never heard a sound. He looked very scary: His cheek was bloody and his shirt was ripped. When I squinted from the kitchen window, I could see that his legs seemed to be stuck in some sort of dark mass. It came down from his belly and reminded me of thick glue, but I thought it maybe could be a very thick smoke, like the one that came out of the animals. There was something about the man, though, that I didn’t like at all. Maybe it was just that he was so angry. It didn’t feel safe to go down to him—even if I realized that he was in pain, and Mama had always said that we should help people in need. I tried to avoid looking at him because of that. I wanted to help, I did, but he scared me too much, walking back and forth like he did, stuck to his black cloud. The animals—and the woman—were much easier. They didn’t scare me at all. Instead, they felt like friends almost, that were there just for me. They made me miss my friends back home a little less.

I really wished that I knew what they wanted, though.

It was on one of those nights, when I had come back to my room and crawled into my bed, that the best thing happened. Just as I closed my eyes, I heard a knocking on the window above me. At first, I thought of the man and shuddered. Then I thought it could be a tree branch. But then, when the knocking never stopped, I decided to look, just to know for sure, since I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway with the knocking going on.

I would never have guessed what I saw when I lifted the curtain away. There was a bird out there—a big raven. It was too big to land on the ledge outside the window, but it flew toward the glass, poking it with its beak whenever it came close enough. I laughed when I saw it, not afraid at all. I knew at once, without knowing how, that it was the same bird that I had seen when I visited K2. I opened the window and the raven flew inside, landing on the bed’s footboard, where it curved its talons around the wood and started picking at its feathers.

I sat up in the bed with the duvet pooling around me, just looking at it, thinking it was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen.

“Who are you?” I whispered, though I didn’t expect it to answer, which made me even more surprised when it did. It didn’t speak with its beak like in a cartoon, but sort of whispered the answer into my head. Not with words, exactly, but more like a knowing—like the answer was suddenly just there.

Irpa, she said.

“What do you—? Is that your name? Irpa?” I asked, and the raven said yes.

“Hi, Irpa,” I said, and cocked my head. Irpa cocked her head back and I laughed. “I’m pleased to meet you,” I said, reaching out a hand and pretending to shake hers in the air. “Where do you come from?” I asked her.

She replied with lots of images that I didn’t understand. There was darkness and dirt, but air and light, too—and a mossy clearing full of bones.

“What are you here for?” I asked her next, when the pictures had disappeared.

This time, the answer was very clear. It was a feeling, not an image, but I knew that she had come to be with me. She said that we belonged together.

“Oh, good.” I let out my breath and laughed again, because I was so happy. Irpa said she was going to be my friend and help me, which was something I definitely needed, since Lily didn’t want to talk about the things that bothered me the most—like the man and the fact that our aunt had red feet.

When I woke up the next morning, Irpa was still there, but when I came up after lunch to get my schoolbooks, she was gone. I had left the window open, so it wasn’t a great mystery, but I worried all day that I wouldn’t see her again. She did come back, though, as soon as I had gone to bed, and I let her inside. She followed me downstairs when I went on my midnight walk through the house, flying before me down the stairs and perching on the furniture. It was even nicer to say hi to the animals when I had someone else with me. She wasn’t like the other animals on Crescent Hill, and not like the old woman either. Irpa was something altogether different, and even if a part of me knew that maybe I should be afraid of her, I wasn’t. Already on the first night, she felt like a part of me—like an arm or a leg, or the freckles on my nose. It was as if I had always known her.

She made things easier, too, because Irpa knew things. The first time we went to visit the bear together, she told me right away that the animal wasn’t supposed to be here anymore. It was gone, she said—and by “gone” she meant dead—and had been gone for a very long time, but something of it was lingering behind, like a footprint. It would be better for the bear if it was whole and strong again. She told me this by showing me a sick bear in the woods, whose fur was matted and gray, and then showing me the same bear happy and healthy, lumbering along. She said the bear couldn’t be happy like that again before it had gotten back what it lost. After that, she made me sit on the green couch for a long time and just listen to the lamp snake until the patter of pebbles in my brain finally made sense. Suddenly—as fast and as bright as a flash of lightning—I knew that the snake was asking me to help it be gone. I almost laughed when it happened, because I was so happy to finally hear it clearly.

It was easy after that: Whenever I passed by an animal, I could feel the asking inside me as clear as my own feelings and thoughts. Suddenly, it was so obvious to me what they wanted to say that it seemed weird that I hadn’t properly heard it before.

They all asked for the same thing, though: to be gone from Crescent Hill.

When I took Irpa to see the old woman, she landed before her on the table, puffed out her chest, and spread her wings. The lady took a step back as if she was scared, or at least a bit nervous, but she didn’t take her eyes off the raven.

Irpa said in my head that the old woman, too, was sick, but sicker than the bear. She hadn’t gone anywhere at all, even though she was dead.

“Why?” I asked her, standing by the table and looking at the two of them: the woman and the bird, who were still staring at each other. Irpa showed me in my head that the woman, too, was stuck to the floor, even though the black cloud wasn’t as big as the one the man outside walked around in. It came out from under the skirt of her nightgown, and Irpa showed me in a lightning-quick flash how it came pouring out of the old woman’s belly button. She also showed me a grassy field full of dead ravens, where I could see how some of them left their bodies and flew away, while others just sat there on top of their bodies. Without really knowing how, I suddenly knew that it was different for everyone, depending on who they were. Some just left—like Mama and Papa—while others stayed behind for a while, not really knowing what had happened to them. And then there were some that wouldn’t leave, and those were the ones that Irpa called sick. Not sick in the body like a disease, but sick in the soul, somehow.

“But why?” I asked again, looking at the woman, who pulled a face like she was in pain.

Irpa, being a bird, couldn’t always explain everything, but she showed me fire and a sword, so I knew that she meant that they were angry, or that there was something violent going on that had made them sick. Just the thought of it made me shudder and feel cold. Who could ever be violent to that sweet old woman? And what had made her angry enough to stay?

I swore there and then that I would help her—no matter what it took.

We helped all the animals the next night, walking between them with a candle I had taken from the dining room, a huge box of matches, and a small tray with a hunk of bread and some salt from the kitchen. I also had a pitcher of water and a drinking glass. I didn’t know exactly why I needed all that, but as soon as they asked me, I just knew what to do. I knew it the same way that I knew how to breathe, or to scratch my nose when it itched. It was as if I had really known all the time but had forgotten that I did. I also knew that since all that was left of the animals were footprints, it wouldn’t be hard to help them. It would just be like using an eraser on pencil scribblings to make them go away, only the eraser was my candle and bread.

When we arrived at each animal, I ripped off some bread and placed it on the floor, before pouring a little salt from the silver saltshaker on top of it and setting a glass of water beside it. Then I stood before the dead animal with the candle and wished with all my might that what was left of them would go to be with the rest of them, wherever that might be. I said words, too—a little verse that just arrived in my head: Dear Mr. Bear, I wish for you to go home now. Bread for your soul, salt for your spirit, bread for your soul, salt for your spirit, bread for your soul, salt for your spirit…I would say the same words over and over again until the candle flame went out without my doing anything to make it happen, and when the tendrils of smoke disappeared, the animals were just stuffing, glass, and fur, and the asking in my head was gone. Every time it happened a ripple of joy ran through my body, because I knew that the animal would be whole and healthy again.

The bread on the floor didn’t look so good after, though, but had grown a layer of green mold. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I stuffed the moldy pieces down in some of the flowerpots that littered the house, hoping that Dina wouldn’t notice. Perhaps it would even be good for the plants—or that was what I hoped for. The water I had poured in the glass had entirely disappeared.

While we made the rounds downstairs, I wondered if the reason why some of the animals stayed was because they had been taxidermized, and Irpa said that it wasn’t unusual for something to remain when an animal was shot or stabbed to death. She showed me a rotting bull in my head, so I figured it meant that they usually went away when the body was gone, but for the animals at Crescent Hill, that had never entirely happened. I asked her if Aunt Clara’s fur coat, too, had something of the animals left in it, but Irpa said it wasn’t as common if the animal didn’t look like it had in life anymore, which was a relief, since all my shoes were made of leather.

It was a good thing to help the animals, though. It felt right in a way I hadn’t felt before. I couldn’t do anything to help the old woman, though—or at least that was what Irpa said.

She had to ask, Irpa told me. Just like the animals had.

I couldn’t do anything at all before she asked.