THE NIGHT WAS full of wind, and the trees around Steeple Hall seemed intent upon trapping it all. They leaned and lunged. Their thick arms creaked with the weight and wallop of the air.
Dec bent his head and wrapped his arms tightly around his sleeping bag. It was June but it felt like winter up here. He imagined the dark hulk of the House of Memory as a freighter tossed on a high sea. He imagined how far off course she was being blown tonight. His teeth chattering, he speeded up his pace, buffeted every step of the way. As cold as it was, it was better than the storm he had left behind at Camelot.
He had no idea how long Birdie had been standing at the door to the rec room.
“September?” she said, her voice thin and disbelieving. “September?” She walked towards them in her stocking feet through the shattered crockery.
Dec had jumped to his feet. “Birdie, be careful,” he said. But she paid no attention.
“September,” she said again, as if the name of the month itself was the concept she couldn’t quite grasp.
By now Bernard was going to her, but she held up her hand and backed away. Backed away until her back was against the wall.
“Honey,” said Bernard. “It was the last —” But she cut him off.
“We started building this house in September.”
“I know,” said Bernard.
“Our house.”
“It was foolish —”
“Foolish?” Her voice was tremulous. “Foolish doesn’t even start… it was wrong, Bernard. Just plain wrong.” She smacked the wall with the flat of her hand.
“Birdie, please,” said Bernard. “Let me try to explain.”
“No!” she shouted. “No, no, no!”
Which was when Sunny woke up, howling.
And Dec slipped away.
He stood in the cool silence of the House of Memory. It seemed too silent. He trained his flashlight on the grandfather clock. It had stopped. His father must have forgotten to wind it.
Dec closed the door of the vestibule behind him, blocking out the wind. He listened, not sure what he expected to hear. But there was nothing. She wasn’t here any more. Her absence filled the house again, the way it had when she first left.
He made his way to his childhood room. He was so tired. Dead tired. He had made a grab at the truth and it had morphed in his hands, turning into something more slippery and strange than he could have imagined. He felt empty now. He just wanted to sleep.
The sound of a car’s engine woke him. It was revving high, fighting the overgrowth on the steep driveway. As Dec struggled up from the depths of sleep, he thought it was the Wildcat — his mother returning at long last. He saw lights pass across the curtains. The car stopped in the roundabout and the lights went out. He listened. Minutes passed until he wondered if he had seen or heard anything at all.
He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and checked the illuminated hands of his watch. It was after midnight. Finally he heard the distinctive thud of a car door. Then footsteps on gravel, on stone, on wood. He heard the front door open and close, then nothing. Thick carpet sucked up the progress of whoever was here. Though he listened with every fibre of his body, all he could hear was the creaking of the old mansion riding out the storm.
Please, God, he begged. Don’t let it be her.
The door of his room opened. A woman appeared silhouetted in the entranceway.
“It’s only me,” she said.
“Birdie?”
“Did I wake you? Stupid question.”
Her voice was flat, lifeless. Dec shinnied up to a sitting position. “What do you want?”
“I’m not sure,” she said.
Dec saw her shoulders shake. Slowly he unzipped his sleeping bag and climbed out. He stood on the rag rug some ancestor had made. He wasn’t sure what to do.
“Are you all right?”
“No,” she said, crossing her arms.
“What happened?”
“You want to know what happened? I’ll tell you. I’m a cow, Declan. That’s what happened. I’m a stupid, jealous, lying cow.”
Dec switched on the flying-saucer lamp on his desk. They both stood there blinking.
“You shouldn’t blame yourself,” he said. “It must have been a shock.”
“I’m not talking about your father’s confession!” she said. Her face looked ravaged, her eyes desolate. “Dec, I’ve done a terrible thing.”
He approached her slowly, took her arm and led her into the room. She came timidly, sniffing and searching in her pockets for a tissue. She was wearing one of his father’s cardigans. Mrs. Rogers. He pulled out the chair from his desk and sat her down, her face ghastly in the mica-tinted light. She shivered. He found a blanket and wrapped it clumsily around her shoulders.
“Thank you,” she said, barely audible.
“You want to tell me about it?”
“You’re not going to like it.”
Dec pulled over a small yellow chair from the Lego table and sat at her feet. “Probably not,” he said. “But I don’t know how much worse things can get.”
Her eyes told him a lot. And with his own eyes he said, I’m ready.
“I didn’t mean to be spying on you and your dad,” she said. “I came downstairs to see if you wanted a cup of tea. I was glad you were talking. There’s been so much not talking lately.” She blew her nose and then jumbled up the wet tissue in her hand.
He couldn’t remember if he had ever seen her so un-put-together. She bit her lip. She wiped her bloodshot eyes. Then she dug something out of the cardigan pocket. It was a compact disk. She handed it to him.
“It’s from Lindy,” she said.
Dec didn’t understand. Lindy had sent him a CD? Then he looked at the picture on the cover. It was Lindy. He held it near the lamp. Lindy’s face almost filled the cover. It might have been the greenish yellow light, but she looked older, thinner in the cheek. Her eyes seemed paler than he recalled, but there was wind and sunlight in her hair, and she was smiling at something she saw in the sky.
“It arrived in late November.”
“Last fall?”
“From California.”
He read the title. “What I Can.”
Dec flipped over the CD. There was another picture. Lindy standing in a field with a guitar in her hand and the sea in the background. It wasn’t her old guitar. This one was blue, the same blue as the shard of sea beyond the yellow grass. The same blue as her eyes. She looked worn down. There was a handwritten song list.
He stared at Birdie, not understanding.
“A friend of hers produced it,” she said. As if that explained anything.
“This is great,” he said, wanting it to be so and knowing it wasn’t. “Why didn’t you show it to me before?”
Birdie pressed her lips tightly together. Dec clutched the CD in both hands and stared at it, willing his mother to speak to him. Then Birdie handed him something else — a cream-coloured envelope.
“This came in March,” she said.
He didn’t want to take it. He had a powerful sense that there was nothing in it he wanted to hear. She prodded his arm with it until, finally, he snatched it from her. He held it for a long moment before opening it.
It was handwritten but it wasn’t Lindy’s hand — someone named Anna. He held the letter near the light and started to read. He didn’t get far.
Lindy was dead.
There were other words on the cream-coloured page but that was the only one he took in. Dead. But then he had already half guessed that from the strange look in Birdie’s eyes.
“Lindy sent the CD to me,” said Birdie. “Not to Bernard, not to you. She sent it to the salon. I don’t even know how she knew about the salon. But she did.”
Dec tried to give her back the letter. She wouldn’t take it. He put it on the desk. Then he got to his feet, in case she tried to take back the CD. Wasn’t that what she was telling him? That it was hers? That she had something over him, over all of them?
“This Anna — she was the one who produced the album. They were friends, I guess. She must have got the salon address from Denny. They kept in touch, Denny and Lindy. I guess we all know that now.”
Dec was only half listening. Who cared? What difference did it make? Lindy had cut an album and died all in a couple of minutes. He stared at the cover. A moment ago it had seemed like a gift. Now it was a casket. A tiny transparent casket.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I didn’t tell anyone. Not about the CD, not about her dying.” Birdie took in a deep breath and then gave it back to the still room. “And not about the other letter, either.”
Again she reached into the pocket of the cardigan, and Dec wondered how deep those pockets were, how many more sorrows she was going to dig up.
This letter was on the same stationery, but the writing was Lindy’s, and the envelope was addressed to Bernard Steeple. Dec peered at Birdie in disbelief.
“What can I say?” she said. “The damn thing arrived on a Monday. About a year ago. A Monday. The one day of the week I’m home. By sheer luck — if you can call it that — I was the one who went out to get the mail that day. I knew who it was right away, soon as I saw the handwriting. Maybe I’d always expected it. Anyway, I told myself it was fate that I should be the one who found it first.” She looked down. “Read it,” she said, as if tired of making any more excuses.
The letter was dated August 3. Dear Bernard, it started. I hope you’re sitting down! Dec couldn’t read any more. “Just tell me,” he said wearily, folding the letter back up and shoving it in the envelope.
“She was looking for money,” said Birdie. “She had a chance to make this CD and so she was hitting up Bernard. I was so mad, I didn’t know what to do. She said she’d been sick, in the hospital a couple times, but she was doing okay and this project was her one big chance to grab onto her dream.”
“So it wasn’t just about money.”
“She didn’t spell it out, Dec. I didn’t know how sick. All I knew was that here she was, again, out of the blue, looking for something.”
Dec stared at Birdie. “She was your best friend.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“Was she asking for a million dollars?”
“No. And it wasn’t the money, anyway. Bernard’s money is his business. I didn’t tell him because I was afraid. Afraid that if he got that letter, he’d go to her.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I did know it, inside,” she said, poking herself in the chest. “And what I learned tonight only proves I was right.”
“It doesn’t prove anything,” said Dec, shaking his head sadly. “You didn’t trust him.”
She squinted at him through eyes swollen half shut with crying.
“Look who’s talking about trust,” she said. Dec looked away.
“Oh, don’t listen to me, Dec,” she said. “It’s Lindy. Trust gets kind of tied up in a knot where she’s concerned. I’d trust your dad to the end of the world, except when it came to her. Anyway, when the letter arrived last August, I told myself, if she doesn’t hear from him, she’ll try again. But she didn’t. Then when the CD arrived, I figured, well, that’s that. She found the money some place else. Great. I didn’t feel so guilty. I told myself I saved Bernard a lot of heartache.” She looked straight at Dec. “You read that letter from Anna and try to imagine how guilty I felt when I learned the truth.”
They sat, the two of them, in the glow of the little lamp on the desk. An antique flying saucer. The future as it was imagined in the past.
Some time passed. The night moved a little farther along the path to day.
She shook her head.
“So why are you telling me?”
“I needed to talk to someone,” she said. “Whatever the consequences. I couldn’t go on feeling like this. Jealousy is an evil, evil thing. There’s no excuse for what I did. But, if you can believe it, I was thinking about your father, too. And you and Sunny.”
“That was kind of you.” He couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice.
She smiled wryly. “I watched you cry your little heart out after Lindy took off. You probably don’t remember. I tried to comfort you. I tried to comfort Bernard. About the only one I made any progress with was Sunny. Then, bit by bit, you accepted that I was here to stay and we figured out how to get along. We have gotten along, Dec. And, bit by bit, your dad came around, too. I couldn’t bear the thought of Lindy getting her claws in him again.”
Birdie sighed. She put her hands on her knees and laboriously climbed to her feet. Whatever guilt she might have unburdened, she was weighed down with still more.
“So what am I supposed to do?”
She shook her head. “Whatever you want.”
“Is this supposed to be our little secret? Because I’m sick of secrets.”
“Tell me about it.”
“So?”
She held her hands out at her sides. “I honestly don’t know. Tell your dad if you like. I don’t care.” She headed towards the door. She stopped and leaned against the door-jamb. Then she turned to look at him. “You’re a good kid, Dec. I know I let you down. All I can say is I’m sorry.”
Dec was too worn out to speak. She left, and after a moment he followed her to the door. From the railing he saw her shadowy figure cross the entrance hallway and leave the big house. He listened to her car drive off, listened until it was out of earshot. And he wondered just how far she would go.