Following Diana’s wishes, I made no effort to contact her after that night. And so two weeks passed before I heard from her again. Then it was her voice over the phone. “I’m moving out of the house,” she said.
“When?”
“In a few days. I found an apartment in Carey Towers. It’s small, but that’s okay. I don’t need much room.”
It was good that she was moving, I thought. The house on Old Farmhouse Road was no doubt clogged with loss and grief and pain, a gloomy, mournful place she’d be well served to abandon.
“I’m having a yard sale on Saturday,” she added. “Mark’s already taken whatever he wanted from the house. I’m selling the rest.”
“Want some help?”
“Sure. Come early. We can have breakfast.”
Abby came with me on that bright Saturday morning, which, of course, I’d fully expected her to do. The surprise was that Patty decided to come along, too.
“Are you sure you want to spend a whole Saturday piddling around a yard sale?” I asked as she came down the walkway to the car.
“I don’t have anything else to do,” she answered. “No band practice, and I’ve finished Mr. Donovan’s paper.”
As we rounded the bend near Diana’s house a few minutes later, I noticed Patty press her face against the window and stare out at the large number of items Diana had spread across the lawn.
“It’s like she’s purging,” Patty said. She kept her eyes on the lawn. “Vomiting everything out. Like Nina does. In the bathroom after lunch.”
“Nina purges?” I asked.
“Sure,” Patty said. She appeared surprised that this was news to me. “Lots of girls do it. It’s a mental thing.”
I glanced toward Diana’s house, and wondered if Diana had been struck by a similarly weird convulsion, a “mental thing” that had resulted in her spewing the yard with her possessions.
The evidence seemed to mount as I pulled into Diana’s driveway. She’d spread blankets across the lawn, then covered them with the varied contents of shelves and drawers. She’d dragged out a few bulky items as well, a wooden chest, several spindly bookshelves, and a couple of CD racks, the CDs themselves arranged for easy identification, labels out, in old shoe boxes.
But she’d gone beyond simply scaling down from a house to an apartment.
She’d brought out her entire library, for example, along with all her kitchen pots and pans and utensils. There were boxes filled with canned goods, salt, pepper, various spices, some of which had not yet been opened. She’d piled her towels and linens onto one blanket, and all but one pair of shoes on another. Sweaters and skirts and blouses hung from a long gray rope she’d stretched between two trees. All of Jason’s toys were for sale, along with his childhood clothing. Every lamp. Every chair. Every piece of art, whether painting or sculpture. There was an entire table piled high with empty picture frames, another with games and videos and even a couple of audiobooks.
I glanced from blanket to blanket, all neatly squared on the front lawn, very well ordered, so that it suddenly no longer looked like “purging” at all.
“She’s starting over,” I said. “Good for her.”
We walked to the front door and Diana immediately opened it. “There’s not much left to do,” she said.
Which was true. Because inside, the heavier items—television, stereo, beds, tables, a sofa—had already been tagged with prices so low there was little doubt that by the end of the day my sister would have nothing. In fact, only my father’s clanking old Royal typewriter was marked “Not For Sale,” along with a trio of obviously recent purchases, all three still in their boxes, a laptop computer, a small laser printer, and a fax machine.
Abby glanced about, then offered her best smile. “Well, you’ve certainly been busy.”
Diana gave her a look I’d seen before, partly in wonder at my wife’s effort to put a shine on things, partly in admiration for the enormous energy it required, the heavy weight of seeming light.
“There’s still a place to sit in the kitchen,” she said. She looked at Patty. “You can have anything you want.” She smiled. “Anything at all, Patty.”
“Thanks,” Patty said. “I’ll look around.” She turned and headed across the lawn, moving from blanket to blanket, before she stopped at the one covered with shoe boxes filled with CDs.
“I made coffee and bought a box of donuts,” Diana said.
Abby and I followed her into the house, back to the kitchen, where we sat down at the only table left in the house.
“I noticed you’re keeping the Old Man’s typewriter,” I said. Diana nodded.
“Many a false, paranoid accusation came burning out of that thing,” I added.
Diana took a short sip of coffee, her eyes peering just above the white rim of the cup. “Paranoid, yes,” she said as she drew the cup from her lips. “But one or two were true.”
By late that afternoon almost everything was gone. A few picture frames lay on an otherwise empty table, and a scattering of clothes still hung from the gray rope between the trees. But the yard was otherwise bare and the house empty.
“You priced things very low,” Patty said in a voice that suggested more inquiry than statement of fact, a gentle probing.
“I didn’t want anything left,” Diana said. “Did you find something for yourself?”
“No,” Patty answered lightly.
“You can’t leave without something,” Diana said. She walked over to a dark green backpack, unzipped one of its small pouches, and plucked out a CD. “Take this,” she said.
The CD had a purple cover and Gothic letters I couldn’t quite make out. “Kinsetta Tabu,” Diana said.
“I’ve never heard of her,” Patty said.
“She uses ancient instruments,” Diana told her. “Her songs are about the world before people like us came along.”
“Like us?” Patty asked. “Before our brains fused.”
Patty looked at her silently, but clearly in search of further explanation. “It’s possible that before the brain fused, one part of it actually spoke to the other,” Diana told her. “So these people, the ones before us, they would have heard their own thoughts as voices outside themselves.” She looked to the right, where Dolphin Pond glimmered softly under the lowering sun. “Like Jason.”
I imagined those voices coming out of nowhere, invisible mouths floating in the air. How threatening they must have seemed to Jason, issuing bizarre commands, warning him against other children, painting his world in nightmarish hues.
I wondered if in the end one of those voices had spoken as he’d stood by the storm fence, peering out toward the pond, the large stone that rested heavily, like a gatepost, at the edge of the water. Go there.
“That must have been very frightening,” Patty said.
“Yes, frightening,” Diana said. She looked at me. “By the way, I’ll be working at the library.”
I thought of the cluttered rooms of the house on Victor Hugo Street. “Surrounded by books,” I said. “Just like old times.” I glanced about. “What are you going to do with the rest of this stuff?”
“I’ll take it to the dump,” Diana answered. She looked at her now empty house, then turned her attention toward Abby, and, to my surprise, walked over and drew my wife into her arms. “Davey’s very lucky,” she said.
Abby peered at me quizzically, her head over Diana’s shoulder. She was clearly surprised by Diana’s unexpected gesture of affection. Even so, she smiled brightly and hugged Diana back.
Diana released Abby, then turned and drew Patty into a similarly affectionate embrace. “Let’s talk sometime,” she said.
“I’d like that,” Patty replied.
Diana took Patty’s hands in hers. “So be it then,” she said.
It was one of the Old Man’s arch constructions, and he’d always delivered it sonorously, as if he were handing down an ultimatum from the floor of the Roman Senate.
“I haven’t heard that in a while,” I said. “Heard what?” Diana asked.
“The Old Man talking.”
She seemed genuinely surprised. “Really, Davey?” she said. “I hear him all the time.”
“What was that all about?” Abby asked as she climbed into bed later that night. She propped a pillow behind her back and plucked a small jar of face cream from the nightstand beside the bed. “Giving Patty that weird CD.” She unscrewed the cap from the jar, dipped her finger in, and scooped a small amount of cream into her other hand. “Telling her they should talk sometime.” She rubbed her hands together then began applying the cream to her face. “Do you think she’s lonely, Dave?”
“Well, she’s lost her son, her husband, too, so—”
“I mean Patty,” Abby interrupted.
“What makes you think Patty’s lonely?” I asked.
Rather than answer, she laughed lightly. “Remember that name your father wanted for her?” she asked. “Hypatia. I don’t remember who she was, but something terrible happened to her.”
“Hypatia was the last pagan astronomer in Alexandria,” I told her, recalling the details of one of the Old Man’s evening lectures. “A Christian mob scraped her to death with oyster shells.”
Abby shook her head. “Imagine wanting your granddaughter named for a woman who was killed that way.” She shivered melodramatically. “Your father had such awful things in his mind, Dave. That’s who Diana got it from, I guess.”
“Got what?”
Abby drew herself beneath the covers. “Those dark thoughts she has.”
“What makes you think she has dark thoughts?” I asked. “Dark thoughts about what?”
“About Jason,” Abby answered. “I noticed it the day she came back from the courthouse, the way she looked when you told me what the judge decided. Like she didn’t believe it was an accident.”
“How could she not believe it was an accident?” I laughed. “I think you’re the one with dark thoughts.”
Abby made no further argument, but I felt a peculiar need to strengthen the case.
“She had a weird childhood, Abby,” I said. “All that reading. Reciting for the Old Man all the time, trying to calm him down. I never thought she’d have a normal life.”
I went on to talk about my relief that after the Old Man’s death, Diana had married, gotten pregnant, given birth, been a good mother, and in doing all these things managed to come out from under the skewed and nutty course of her upbringing, escaped, as I thought I had, the consequences of our father’s madness.
“Diana is a triumph,” I said. “A survivor.”
Abby reached for the lamp. “Whatever you say, Dave.”
Within seconds she was fast asleep, but I was still going over the whole matter in my mind an hour later when the phone rang. It struck me as strangely coincidental that it was Diana.
“I’m reading about Cheddar Man,” she said. “The skeleton that was found in Cheddar Gorge, England.”
“What about him?” I asked.
“There were animal bones in the cave with him, and they had the same marks on them,” Diana answered. “Scraping marks. So he was eaten. By other people. Using tools.” She paused briefly, then added, “I’m sorry, Davey. I didn’t notice the time. Did I wake you?”
“No,” I said. “I was still up. Why are you reading about this … Cheddar Man?”
“Because Kinsetta Tabu has a song about him. Wait. Listen.”
Another brief pause, then a woman’s voice came on the line chanting to a primitive accompaniment that sounded vaguely like a blade scraping ice or stone, repeating a single eerie phrase, World of whirl is whorl of world.
Diana came on the line again. “It’s on the CD I gave Patty. I bought another one for myself. I thought she might have questions after she listened to it, so that took me to Cheddar Man.”
I recalled all the other CDs, boxes of them for sale. “Why did you keep that particular CD?” I asked.
“Because Jason was listening to it,” Diana answered. “While I was gone.”
“The day he died?”
“Yes.”
There was another brief silence, and I could almost feel my sister thinking, hear the minute firings of her brain.
“So it was the last voice he heard,” I said. “Kinsetta Tabu’s.”
Her answer had the effect of a tiny point of steel pressed into my flesh, worrisome but not life threatening.
“Maybe,” she said.