Tell My Sorrows to the Stones (21 page)

The ceiling beams creaked worryingly. Loudly. The rocking stopped and she opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling with milky-white, unseeing eyes. Mike held his breath, looking from her blind eyes to the ceiling. The storm hadn’t made that noise. It sounded like an elephant shifting its weight in the attic, but this house had no attic.

“You’re. Not. Here.” The old woman spoke each word with furious defiance.

The floorboards creaked over by the door.

Mike and the old lady both spun toward the sound. Blind, she strained to listen more closely. But Mike stared in confusion, for there was nothing there to see.

A rap came at the window behind him and he jumped, shouting, turned expecting to see a face at the window, but there was only the night and the snow. His throat tightened and he couldn’t even shout, now. His pulse sped so fast that his whole body felt flushed, warmer than the fire could ever have made him.

“Stop,” the old woman whispered, and it sounded like a kind of surrender. An admission.

Rapid-fire, there came more rapping at the windows.

“Oh, Jesus. Holy shit,” Mike whispered.

The floor groaned again by the door, creaking in increments as whatever had entered the house moved closer to the fireplace—to the old woman in her rocking chair.

Shaking her head, she pushed up from her rocker. “No, no,” she said. “No, no, no. You won’t. Not me.”

Fierce and grim, she stepped backward toward the fireplace, one hand reaching behind her for the mantel. Mike sucked in air, breathing again, gaze shifting back and forth between the old woman and the place where the floor creaked, where something moved nearer to her.

“Leave her alone!” he shouted.

And he moved. He thought of Cori, and of their baby, but he couldn’t stop himself. He went toward the old woman, but his focus was mostly on that empty-but-not-empty spot in the room.

So he only saw out of the corner of his eye as she peeled off her shawl and thrust it into the fireplace.

Mike turned. “Lady, what are you—”

The shawl caught, flames spreading with a rush of air.

He reached for her, and his hands passed right through as though she wasn’t really there. Or he wasn’t. Mike could only watch as she held the burning shawl out before her, both hands wreathed in fire. She knew this place, her home. Blind or not, she must have been able to see it inside her head. She went to the window, quickly touching the burning shawl to the dusty curtains.

The fire roared as the curtains began to burn, flames jumping up toward the ceiling, dancing as though in celebration. The rapping on the windows ceased. The floorboards shook. Beneath Mike’s feet, one of them cracked.

He heard whispers, angry little bits of wind that whipped past him.

The woman reached the next window, and those curtains billowed with fire. She held her fists in front of her and Mike could see that the flames had spread to her dress. When her hair lit on fire, she started to scream.

As she reached for the next set of windows, something struck her from behind, lifting her off her feet and knocking her across the room. She hit the wall, and fell to the ground, where fire began to spread from the burning woman’s broken body.

Dead. She had to be dead. But she’d finished the job she started. There would be no stopping this fire. It licked up the walls and raced across the dry timber beams overhead.

Mike ran for the door. The floor groaned and the ceiling beams creaked, but he couldn’t tell now if it was the fire that caused the house to shift or whatever unseen thing had come inside. On either side of the door, the walls were starting to burn, smoke furling up from the wood.

Those whispers continued in his ears like the shushing of a theatre audience as the curtain went up. They seemed to chase him to the door. He grabbed the knob and twisted it, flung the door open, and the winter wind gusted in, feeding the flames.

He lunged out the door—

—and tripped on thick weeds, falling headlong into the tall grass.

The sun shone down upon him, the spring breeze rustling the grass and the trees around the clearing. Far off he could hear a truck’s engine. Mike flipped onto his back and scrabbled backward a few feet, staring at the half-tumbled chimney, which was all that remained of that house. His breath came in quick gasps and he looked around one more time before leaping to his feet.

Eyes wide, he stared at the rubble of the old woman’s house.

Something shifted in the ruins. An old length of charred timber cracked.

Mike shook his head. “No way.”

The upper portion of the remaining chimney gave way, bricks and mortar tumbling and sifting down into the grass and weeds.

Mike took three quick steps backward, still staring, still slowly shaking his head. He didn’t understand any of it, what he had seen and heard and felt. Where he had been. But as he stared at the jagged remnant of chimney, his eyes refocused on something beyond it, at the far side of the clearing. One of the standing stones.

They made a kind of oval around the area, like some kind of property marker.
No trespassing,
he thought. And that old woman had been so sure that whatever unseen things had come for her, they shouldn’t be there. Couldn’t get in.

But she didn’t mean the house
.

Something shifted in his peripheral vision and he twisted, stared, waited. For a moment nothing moved, and then the tall grass parted as something he couldn’t see moved nearer. The grass rustled to his left, and then it began to ripple in a dozen different places, parting as the unseen approached.

They’d entered the house twenty or thirty years ago, and they’d remained there, undisturbed. He’d stirred the ashes, he’d done something—that shard of bone, something he shouldn’t have done. Did it matter what?

Whispering filled the clearing.

Like a starter pistol, it shocked him to action. He bolted, racing along the unused path. His legs pistoned beneath him and his heart clenched. He watched his footing, careful for roots and stones, and for a few seconds he thought they had not pursued. But then the leaves rustled and there was no breeze, and he heard the whispers again off to the right and then the left, and he knew.

He muttered things that were part prayer and part apology and he held in his mind an image of Cori’s face, and he ran.

Mike burst from the woods into his backyard and by then his chest burned with exertion. He staggered to a stop, turning to face the woods, hands on his knees, and his mind worked feverishly. Whatever they were, they’d gotten past her markers, gotten in. But maybe the reason they had stayed so long was that they couldn’t get out.

A spark of hope ignited. Breathing hard, he stood up and surveyed the woods. Young leaves rustled a bit, but only with the breeze. Just the breeze. He smiled, nodding to himself, convincing himself.

But he had to get back to Cori. Get her out of here for a while, think about this, talk it over. Have someone else come and take a look to make sure he wasn’t out of his mind.

He started up to the house, looking over his shoulder, watching the woods. He had to go around the empty swimming pool, between two of the stumps the contractors had pulled up.

It lay there on the ground, bottom third caked with dirt—three feet of grey, rough-hewn stone, carved with crude symbols.

Mike froze, looked up at the house, and then broke into a run.

“Cori!” he shouted as he banged through the back door, running through the mud-room into the kitchen. A half-full glass of strawberry lemonade sat on the counter beside a small bowl of freshly made chicken salad.

He ran out into the corridor. “Cori!”

Up the stairs, images flashing in his mind of things that had been and things he hoped would be. Cori and her rounded belly. Laughter by the pool. A little girl on a swing set.

“Cori, honey?” he called as he reached the top of the stairs.

Then, her voice. “Mike? What’s wrong?”

He darted down the hall to the door of the nursery, and relief flooded through him, a giddy love that made him hate himself for the wrongs he’d done her and renew promises he’d silently made to both of them about the future.

Cori was just getting up, pieces of the baby’s mobile spread on the floor around her. Butterflies and rainbow hot air balloons and fairies and birds. She held the main body of the thing in one hand. It hung lopsided because she’d only half-finished attaching the items that would spin from it.

“You’re okay,” he said, catching his breath, leaning against the door frame.

“Of course I’m okay. What’s wrong? You were gone a while.”

Mike went to her and pulled her into his arms. He pressed his face into her curls, kissed her head, then moved down to kiss the spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose.

“God, you’re shaking.”

“What are you doing in here, Mrs. Shaughnessy?” he asked.

She looked at him oddly, but smiled. “It’s only a mobile. I’m not that superstitious. What harm could it do? Besides, we’re nesting today.”

He let out another long breath and held her until his heart finally stopped pounding.

From the corner of the room came the creak of old wood.

On a warm, late summer’s night, Donika Ristani sat on the roof outside her open window—fat-bellied acoustic guitar in her hands—and searched for the chords that would bring life to the music she knew lay within her. The shingles were warm from the sun, though an hour had passed since dusk, and the smell of tar and cut grass filled her with a pleasant summery feeling that kept her normally flighty spirit from drifting into fancy.

The radio played in her room, competing with the music of the woods around the house—the crickets and owls and rustling things—which grew to a crescendo as though attempting to draw her down amongst the trees. Her fingers plucked and strummed, for she despised the use of a pick, and she created a third melody that created a kind of balance between the radio and the woods, the inside and outside.

Joe Jackson sang “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” Donika liked the song well enough, but her thoughts were elsewhere, thinking about inside and outside—about the person she was for her mother’s sake, and the person that all of her instincts told her she ought to be. She found herself strumming Harry Chapin’s “Taxi,” lost in her head, and singing along to the weird bridge in the middle of the tune.

I’ve been letting my outside tide me over ’til my time runs out.

The truth frustrated the hell out of her and she brought her right hand down on the strings to stop herself playing another note of that song. Her gaze drifted down her driveway to the darkened ribbon of Blackberry Lane, searching for headlights, for some sign of her mother’s return. Without so much as a glimmer from the road, she looked out across the dark, thick woods north of the house, impatient to be down there, following the path to Josh Orton’s house. He’d be waiting already, and she could practically feel his arms around her, his face nuzzling her throat.

Donika laughed softly at herself; or perhaps she sighed. She couldn’t tell the difference sometimes.

The DJ did his cool voice and introduced the next tune. Donika smiled and started playing the first notes on her acoustic before it even started on the radio. Bad Company. “Rock and Roll Fantasy.” Good song. Her bedroom walls were covered with posters of Pink Floyd, Zeppelin, and Sabbath, but she liked a little bit of everything. Most of her girlfriends would have laughed at some of the stuff she sang along to on the radio. Or maybe not. Hell, most of them thought Donna Summer the pinnacle of musical achievement.

Now she wished she’d listened more closely to the Joe Jackson tune. She might have to break into her babysitting stash to buy that album.

Her fingers moved up and down the frets, playing Bad Company by ear. She’d never played the song before, but the guitar was like an extension of herself and picking out the notes presented no greater difficulty than singing along. The crickets had gotten louder, but she managed not to hear them. The radio crackled a bit; some kind of interference, maybe the weather or a passing jet. She didn’t understand such things very well. Turn on the box, the music came out. What else did she need to know?

The heat of the day still lingered in her skin the same way it did in the shingles. No more sticky humidity, so that was nice. She felt comfortably warm up there in her spaghetti strap tank top and cutoff jeans, as if the sun had gotten down inside her instead of setting over the horizon, and it would hide there until morning.

Owls cried out in the woods, and Donika glanced up, searching the trees as though she might spot one, the strings of her guitar momentarily forgotten. Other people thought they were funny birds, but she had always heard something else in their hooting, a terrible sadness that she always wanted to answer with her own frustrations.

A flash of light came from the road. She watched the headlights move along Blackberry Lane and her breath caught as she thought of Josh again. When the car drove by without slowing down, she sighed and lay back against the slanted roof, the shingles rough and hot against her back. She hugged the guitar and wondered if Josh was sitting outside, waiting for her, or if he was up in his room listening to music on his bed. Both images had their appeal.

Somehow she missed the sound of an approaching engine, and looked up only as light washed across the trees and she heard tires rolling up the driveway. Donika sat forward as her mother’s ancient Dodge Dart putted up to the house. When she turned off the engine, it ticked and popped, and then the door creaked open.

“Get off that roof, ’Nika!”

The girl laughed. The woman had eyes like a hawk, even in the dark.

She slipped in through her bedroom window and put away her guitar before going downstairs. Her mother stood in the kitchen, looking through the day’s mail. Qendressa Ristani had lush black hair like her daughter, but streaked with grey. She wore it pulled back tightly. Though her mother was nearly fifty, Donika thought her hairstyle too severe, more appropriate for a grandmother. Her clothes reflected the same sensibility, which probably explained why she never dated. Though she’d given up wearing black a decade or so back, Donika’s mother still saw herself as a widow. Men might flirt with her—she was prettier than most women her age—but Qendressa would not encourage them. She’d been widowed young, and had no desire to replace the only man she had ever loved.

Her life was the seamstress shop where she worked in downtown Jameson, and the home she’d made for herself and her daughter upon coming to America a dozen years before. But her old world upbringing still persisted in many ways, not the least of which was her insistence on using herbs and oils as homegrown remedies for all sorts of ills, both physical and spiritual.

“How was your day, Mom?”

“Eh,” the woman said, “is the same.”

Donika grabbed her sandals and sat down at the table, slipping one on. Her mother dropped the mail on the table. As she fastened the straps on her sandals, she looked up to find her mother staring at her.

“Where you going?”

“Josh’s. Sue and Carrie and a couple of Josh’s friends are there already, waiting for me. We’re going to walk into town for pizza.”

“You going to hang around those boys dressed like that?”

Donika flushed with anger and stood up, the chair scraping backward on the floor.

“Look, Ma, you need to get off this stuff. This is 1979, not 1950, and we’re in Massachusetts, not Albania. You want me to be home when you get back from work so you won’t worry about me? Okay, I sort of understand that. I don’t like it, but I get it. But look around. I don’t dress differently from other girls. Turn on the TV once in a while—”

“TV,” her mother muttered in disgust, averting her eyes.

“I’m going to be sixteen tomorrow,” Donika protested.

Qendressa Ristani sniffed. “This is supposed to make me less worried? This is
why
I worry!”

“Well don’t! I’m fine. Just let me enjoy being sixteen, okay?”

The woman hesitated, taking a long breath, and then she nodded slowly and waved her daughter away. “Go. Be a good girl, ’Nika. Don’t make me shamed.”

“Have I ever?”

Finally, her mother smiled. “No. Never.” Her expression turned serious. “Tomorrow, we celebrate, though. Yes? Just the two of us, all the things you love for dinner. You can have your friends over on Friday and we have a cake. But, tomorrow, just us girls.”

Donika smiled. “Just us girls.”

The path emerged from the woods in the backyard of an older couple who were known to shout at trespassers from their screened-in back porch. Donika had never experienced their wrath and wondered if they didn’t mind so much when a girl crossed their yard—maybe thinking girls didn’t cause as much trouble as boys—or if they simply didn’t see her. As she left the comfortable quiet of the woods and strolled across the back lawn and then alongside the house, she watched the windows, wondering if either of the old folks were looking out. Nothing stirred inside there. It hadn’t been dark for long, but she wondered if they were already asleep, and thought how sad it must be to get old.

When she reached the street, she saw Josh sitting on the granite curb at the corner, smoking a cigarette. Her sandals slapped the pavement as she walked and he looked up at the sound. One corner of his mouth lifted in a little smile that made her heart flutter. He flicked his cigarette away and stood to meet her, cool as hell in his faded jeans and Jimi Hendrix t-shirt.

“Hey,” he said.

Donika smiled, feeling strangely shy. “Hey.”

Josh pushed his shoulder-length blond hair away from his eyes. “Your mom kept you waiting.”

“Sorry. Sometimes I think she stays late on purpose. Maybe she figures if she keeps me waiting long enough, I won’t go out.”

“So much for that plan.”

“I’m glad you didn’t give up on me,” Donika said.

They’d been standing a couple of feet apart, just feeling the static energy of the distance between them. Now Josh reached out and touched her face.

“Never happen.”

A shiver went through her. Josh did that to her, just by standing there, and the way he looked at her.

His hand slipped around to the back of her neck and he bent to kiss her. Donika tilted her head back and closed her eyes, letting the details of the moment wash over her, the feel of him so near, the softness of his lips, the strange, burnt taste of nicotine as his tongue sought hers.

Only when they broke apart, a giddy little thrill rushing through her, did she look around and remember where they were. Lights were on in some of the houses along Rolling Lane, and anyone could be watching them.

She felt pleasantly buzzed, as though she’d had a few beers, but she slid her hand along his arm and tangled her fingers in his.

“We shouldn’t be doing this out here. I told my mother Sue and Carrie and those guys were gonna be here and we were going to get pizza. If anyone ever saw us and told her, she’d have a fit.”

“She doesn’t think you’ve ever kissed me?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t plan to ask,” Donika said. “God, she already thinks I’m slutty just for wearing cutoffs and hanging around with boys.”

Josh arched an eyebrow and took out another cigarette. “Boys? Are there others?”

She hit him. “You know what I mean.”

“Your mom’s pretty old world.”

Donika rolled her eyes. “You have
no
idea. She burns candles for me and puts little bunches of dried herbs and stuff under my bed, tied in little ribbons. Pretty sure they’re supposed to ward off boys.”

“How’s that going?”

Donika only smiled.

Josh kissed her forehead. “So, do you want to go get pizza?”

“Only if you’re hungry.”

Josh laughed softly, unlit cigarette in his hand. His blue eyes were almost grey in the night time. “I could eat. I could always eat. But I’m good. We could just hang out. Why don’t we walk downtown, get an ice cream or something.”

“Or we could just go for a walk in the woods. I love those paths. Especially at night.”

“You’re not afraid?” Josh asked as he thumbed his lighter, the little flame igniting the tip of his cigarette. He drew a lungful of smoke and stared at her.

“Why would I be?” Donika said. “I’ve got you with me.”

She led him by the hand back across the street and through the yard of the belligerent old couple. Josh’s cigarette glowed orange in the dark. The moon and stars were bright, but as they passed alongside the house and into the backyard of that old split-level house, with the canopy of the woods reaching out above them, the darkness thickened and little of the celestial light filtered through.

“Goddamn you kids!” a screechy voice shouted from the porch. “You’re gonna burn the whole damn forest down with those cigarettes!”

Donika started and looked at the darkened porch anxiously. Josh put a hand up to try to keep himself from laughing, and that started Donika grinning as well. The voice was faintly ridiculous, like something out of a cartoon or a movie. On the porch, in the dark, another pinprick of burning orange glowed. The old man was smoking, too.

Josh paused to drop the butt and grind it out with his heel. Then, laughing, they ran into the trees, following the path that had been worn there by generations.

Hand in hand, they followed the gently curving path through the woods and talked about their friends and families, and about music.

“I love talking about music with you,” Josh told her. “The way your eyes light up . . . I don’t know, it’s like you feel it inside you more than most people because you can make music with your guitar.”

Donika shuddered at that. No one had ever understood that part of her the way that Josh did. He liked the sad songs best, the tragic ones, just as she did. Their conversation meandered, but she didn’t mind. All she wanted was his company.

Mostly, they just walked.

The paths had been there forever, or so it seemed. There were low stone walls, centuries-old property markers that had been built up by hand and ran for miles. Old, thick roots crossed the path and small animals rustled in the branches above them and in the underbrush on either side. An entire system of paths ran through the woods. They reached a fork and followed the right-hand path. The left would have taken them up the hill toward her house, and that was the last place she wanted to go.

“You seem far away,” Josh said as they passed through a small clearing where someone had built a firepit. Charred logs lay in the pit and the stones around it had been blackened by flames.

Donika squeezed his hand and looked up at him. “Nope. Just happy. I love the woods. Being out here . . . it’s so peaceful. So far away from other people. I walk through here all the time, but having you here with me makes it so much better.”

Josh stopped walking and gazed down at her. The moon and stars illuminated the clearing, and she saw the mischief in his eyes.

“Better how?” he asked.

She gave him a shy little shrug. “Just feels right.”

He kissed her again and she could hear music in her head. Or maybe it was her heart. His hands slid down her back, pulling her close, so that their bodies pressed together. She liked the feel of him against her, his strong arms wrapped around her. Through his jeans she could feel his hardness pressing into her, and she liked that very much. Just knowing that she had that effect on him made her catch her breath.