IT IS THE Soper girl, all right. She can tell that much, feels the tingle at the back of her neck, akin to the feeling she gets when a rat stumbles into one of her traps in the woods. Of all the times she has had that feeling, she has never once found an empty trap.
These students—if that is what they are—look strange to her, however. Too accepting. Glassy-eyed. Distant. Could they be different kinds of ghosts from the ones to whom she has grown accustomed? Ghosts arrayed in modern clothing? Or could they be figments of her imagination?
But that boat behind the seawall was solid enough when she took her ax to it, and that thing surely did not steer itself to her shore. So they must be real people. And they carry an air that would offend her under any circumstances. Worse now that she knows for sure what they are about, curiosity seekers at her everlasting expense.
And the Soper girl. The Soper girl! The Soper girl! She trembles to visualize the terrible thread that began in the loins of George A. Soper and grew like a tapeworm through the generations.
Mary peers over her shoulder at the visitors as she stirs the rabbit stew on the kitchen stove. When earlier she brought the pot down from its hiding place, she saw that the students in their prying left a burner knob open. She smiles now thinking of it. Young fools did that, not ghosts. They could not know about the shutoff valve to the gas line she always uses, around to the side of the equipment and behind.
The students stare at her from across the kitchen. She feels their dewy eyes on her back. They drool at the scent of her lovely stew. With her heightened senses, she can almost hear the saliva drip. She will not turn around just now, directs her mind instead to memory of her forced visit to the hospital on Sixteenth Street. They held her down, they did, the orderlies under Dr. Baker’s direction, in order to draw blood.
But she was strong.
When she saw the needle come out, she writhed so that they chose to strap her to a hard chair with leather restraints, her blouse torn in the process, her left arm eventually laid bare and vulnerable, wrist facing up.
“Open your hand, Mary,” Dr. Baker instructed. “Relax your arm.”
Instead she closed her muscular hand into a fist, held it fast in a ball. Her last measure of resistance. An orderly worked to pry her fingers apart but could not. She looked him in the eye, gritted her teeth.
Two of them tried together, one finger at a time. She had her short nails digging into the heel of her own hand so tight that red fluid began to seep forth.
There is your blood. On my own terms.
They attempted with the needle to penetrate her forearm regardless. So enraged was she that she barely felt it then. The nurse broke the skin, but the needle bent, caught in rigid muscle. The nurse withdrew the device and held it up, showing Dr. Baker, who pursed her lips and shook her head.
On her instructions, the orderlies persisted. Two of them. Strong men, pulling on Mary’s sturdy fingers.
Mary held fast, her fists clenched as tightly as her teeth.
Then the smaller of the two orderlies, a freckled redhead named O’Connor whose parents probably came directly from the old sod, got a devilish look in his arctic-blue eyes. With Dr. Baker and the nurse looking away, debating what to do, he reached down between Mary’s legs and pinched her in a spot that none but Briehof had ever touched.
She gasped. It took all her strength not to cry out, not to give him the satisfaction of that victory. Her legs snapped closed but her hands unclenched.
Immediately the orderlies flattened her left palm open. “Hurry!” one urged the nurse, who produced a fresh needle, holding it point up as she approached.
That needle! Mary had never visited a doctor in her life. Never yielded control of herself to the whims of others. The pinch to her privates was insult enough. When that needle entered her, it punctured her very soul.
Finally, they had one of their three samples. One only. Later, alone in the locked hospital room, the specimen jars sat empty for a second day. She continued to insist on flushing the toilet against their wishes. Soper came in with a janitor, his eyebrows raised, his gaze determined. She looked at him with hatred, sat on the bed with her arms folded across her chest, attempting to anticipate his next move.
The janitor went into the bathroom and emerged a minute later. Soper, without a word, just a cold stare over his shoulder, followed him out. Mary heard the door to the hall lock but tested it anyway. She examined the bathroom. How stupid did they think she was? The janitor had turned off the water to the toilet but had not removed the shutoff-valve knob. When she needed to go again, she opened the line with a few turns of the knob and resumed flushing.
But she lay abed in dark despair. She knew Soper and his cohorts would prevail eventually. They had all the power, had demonstrated that much when they extracted her blood.
And the memory of that feeling—or was it more than a memory; had it never gone away, even for a second?—salted the open wound of her indictment against George A. Soper. For as she now looks over that Soper girl and her friends, all she can think is how normal they appear. As had the girl’s hard-hearted great-grandfather long ago. For when Mary lay in that hideously pristine hospital bed, confined in a room so sterile it almost served, in and of itself, as an act of aggression against her, she thought how Soper did casual violence to her in the morning and went home to his fine family in the afternoon. How he passed through the streets in his three-piece suit with his pocket watch and his spectacles, carrying his smugness like a badge while she lamented the loss of what little she had: her independence, her freedom, control over her own person.
In her view today, the legacy of Soper’s careless power now lives on in these students who intrude upon her island. She sees, even glassy-eyed, that they are so normal and Mary is so different. Yet—she smiles—their normalcy makes them most vulnerable to the predations she considers. Their stupor further clears the way for advancement of her plans. Even on their best day, they are likely so blinded by their own privilege that they cannot fathom what she is capable of doing when provoked. And of course, she has long been provoked.
Furthermore, they have now agreed to dinner. However reluctantly, they have begun to trust.
They continue to stare at her back. She spins round on them abruptly. Did they jump? “A watched pot never boils. Do be a pet and proceed to the cafeteria. There.” She points to the door with a bent index finger. “Have a seat and I’ll be with you.”
As they obey, she turns back to stir the pot, thinking she must make a good show of hosting them. So many plates broken over the years that there are only a few intact in the pantry, and the hospital administrators left scarcely any utensils behind when they packed up. Yet she saw more than a few utensils somewhere.…
She ponders. It takes her a minute to remember. What she needs lies in a basement room, long forgotten by everyone. Although Mary herself gathered some of the items that reside in that room, she hates to go there. It is an eddy churning with lost souls who have attached themselves to the things that rescue crews picked from the shore long ago—those rescue crews that managed to beat back the scavengers.
As thoughts of the basement room cross Mary’s mind, Mathilde surfaces. Mary spots her out the corner of her eye but refuses to acknowledge her. She makes herself busy stirring and stirring the pot.
“Mary.”
“Go away. Not now.”
“If not now, when?”
There is something different about the apparition today. Mary, unable to resist curiosity, turns fully to her right and sees in an instant, brings a hand to her own mouth and bites hard enough on a finger to taste salty blood. Mathilde’s children accompany her. The girl, Friede, nine years old, has a ring of soot around her mouth and nostrils, her eyebrows seared off, her legs stripped of skin. The boy, Adolf, four years old, wears a life preserver, broken in two places and barely clinging to his narrow shoulders. None of the children she infected ever looked so bad. His cheeks are pale blue and his lips have a purple pallor. The eyes stare unblinking.
Mary whispers. “Leave me be, Mathilde.”
“But you have it all and we have nothing.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. They took everything. I stand empty.”
“You live,” Mathilde snaps. “The flame burns. What good is a flame that does not singe? Look. Look at them—my precious children.”
Mary averts her eyes. “I can’t bear it.”
“More’s the pity. Neither could they.” Mathilde snarls. “Use it, Mary. Use what they left you.”
Mary stirs and stirs her pot, feeling the weight of Mathilde’s stare.
“All this time,” the woman says, clutching her children. “Do you know what I am?”
Mary stops stirring, her dripping spoon poised on the lip of the pot. “What? The devil?”
“Hah! You should be so lucky.” Mathilde’s speech grows slow, a frog in her throat. “I am the shade of lost moments.”
“Oh.” Upon hearing this, an emptiness, all-consuming, sucks Mary dry. She begins to swoon but catches herself. Her spoon drops to the floor and she picks it up and fixes her eyes on the middle distance.
“We cry for something important. When we’re not choking on smoke, we’re crying for justice at the tops of our lungs. Yet we remain ever unheard.”
“I hear you,” Mary says. “All the time.”
“What good is to hear if that which is heard goes unanswered? You yourself once cried for justice.”
“Once? I cry for it every day.”
“And here, before you, lies your chance to put mustard to those cries! They dared to come. Do you dare to do what you must do?”
Mary touches the spoon to her lips, a habitual motion to taste the stew, but she tastes nothing.
“Think, Mary. You won’t get this chance again.”
“I—I can’t.” Mary’s tears dribble into the pot as she shakes her head. “I am outnumbered, always outnumbered.”
“Not today. There are a thousand of us here for you, our strength magnified by circumstance. For once, you are not alone—not as Soper left you.”
A groan issues from deep within Mary’s chest.
Her lip curls just thinking of the Soper girl’s trespass. The Soper girl—just there in the next room. One of that clan so close after all these years.
“Soon,” says Mathilde, “she will sit down to dinner. Wasn’t that always your strong suit?”