SHE KNOWS THE sound of every living thing and every dead thing on North Brother. The drone of planes that fly high overhead and the thrum of helicopters that follow the river. The rats scurrying and rabbits chewing and squirrels scrambling. The wind blowing through ruins. Rain on broken glass. Dripping fog. The hum of pleasure boats and the rumble of barges and tugboats. The buzz of every beetle and bee and fly and wasp. The North Brother trees soughing and their leaves rustling and fluttering. The calls of crows and jays and titmice and sparrows and seagulls and the cries from the family of black-crowned night herons that lives in the cove by the boathouse.
The buildings themselves issue sounds, and not just from the ghosts that inhabit them, not just from the cries of bottomless despair that animate hundreds of women and children and a few innocent men. Sometimes she hears the heavy paint peeling, the rust scaling off iron supports, screws twisting loose, air sighing through old vents. The old metal equipment ticks with expansion and contraction when temperatures change. Sometimes structural pieces of the buildings give way to gravity, a crack followed by the crash of plaster and glass.
The sound that she just heard, however—this sound she does not know. It woke her from a deep sleep. Slowly she tries to conjure it back, to relive it so that she may make sense of it.
Metal. That is what it was. Rickety metal trembling against resistance.
She puts it together with the sound of dull banging that did not drift from another island; the hum of a small motor craft very close by, which cut out abruptly; the pop of something in the woods that she suspects did not result from a falling branch.
She sits up in her bed with the carving fork in her fist and sniffs the air.
A moist waft of rabbit stew reaches her nostrils.
She pushes herself up from the bed and rushes down to the kitchen on cat feet—not her usual clomping. Pauses to listen. There are voices. Faint but unmistakable. The voices of living people far away in another part of the pavilion.
The rabbit stew looks good and rich. She turns off the flame and covers the pot, stifling the steam.
Mathilde, living in the world of shades, may have been confused. It could be that someone comes for Mary after all.
She hides the knife she used to butcher the rabbit. Rather than stow the pot in the pantry, as she typically would, she carries it to her most secret room. A thousand men could search this island, this very building, and they would not find her hiding place. It has survived every incarnation of the pavilion. When she moved here, the doctors and nurses missed it. As did the army men who were briefly housed here, the drug addicts and delinquents, their handlers and their janitors.
She is safe here from everyone, she reminds herself. Even safe from the rats and the flies. Safe—but no! She will no longer cower. Why, the meekest ghosts have been braver than she all these years. No more! If these are new sounds, she will explore them. If they be trespassers, she will follow them.
Out in the hall, all is quiet, but the air feels different. It flutters her skirt as she moves apace, tickling the hair of her shins.
Let it.
She walks through silence.