The Ghost Orchid (36 page)
Only much later, when the typing has long stopped, do I go out to the porch with two glasses of iced tea. I hand one to Nat, who’s sitting in one of the old Adirondack chairs. In addition to the tea I’ve brought out the bowl with the orchid in it, which I place on the porch railing, where it catches the late afternoon light. Then I sit in the other Adirondack chair and take a sip of the iced tea—which does, indeed, have the smoky taste of good scotch. I’m dying to ask Nat what he was writing today, but I’m afraid to focus too bright a light on whatever wisp of inspiration he’s gotten ahold of. So instead I ask him if he’s remembered anything new today. Like Mira, Nat’s memory has been playing tricks on him this summer, inventing incidents that seem entirely new to Nat. And although one might expect such
recovered memories
to be of traumatic events, they’re usually of something kind of nice. A memory of his grandfather taking him fishing on the reservoir and even taking him to the overlook to see the sign about Ne’Moss-i-Ne.
“Well, there is something,” he says. “Here, let me show you something.”
Nat leans forward in his chair and holds out his hands, turning them first palms up, then palms down. Then he reaches toward me and pulls a flower out from behind my ear. Even before I see it I can smell it: sweet, spicy vanilla. Nat displays the white orchid with a flourish and hands it to me.
“How did you do that?” I ask, dipping my head to inhale the orchid’s creamy scent.
“Well, I suddenly
remember
that my grandfather taught me how. On my fifth birthday—an event I could have sworn was
not
attended by him at all since it was in Darien, Connecticut, and he
hated
Darien. But now I’ve got this picture”—Nat holds up his thumbs and forefingers to make a frame—“of him in the backyard pulling coins out of my ear to the amusement of all my friends. And he tells me that on
his
fifth birthday the carnival came to town and a tall, dark-haired magician taught him that trick.”
I open my mouth to say something but then think better of it.
Nat takes a sip of his iced tea and lets his eyes drift over the pond. The late afternoon sun has turned the water copper and gold. In the distance I hear the long eerie cry of a loon and then, a moment later, the answering call of its mate.
“It’s crazy,” Nat says, “but I swear I never knew how to do that magic trick before.” I look over to the glass where the orchid I found today still floats. What I’d like to ask is where he found the orchid in my hands. Instead I ask him if he’d like to take a drive.
“Sure,” he says. “Where to?”
“The overlook,” I say.
On the way to the overlook we stop in the little post office in town and pick up our mail. Most of it is for Nat—copies of
Bomb
and the
New Yorker,
fan mail forwarded from his publisher, and a letter from his agent—all of which he tosses in the backseat of the car. The only thing for me is a small parcel from my mother, which I open as Nat drives. I’m distracted from its contents by Nat suddenly saying, as if continuing our conversation of half an hour ago on the porch, “You think the past has changed because of what happened during the séance, don’t you? And you know who the magician was.”
I turn to him, but he’s looking straight ahead at the road. Even on a clear day the reservoir road can have unexpected patches of fog. “Yes,” I say, “I think it was Tom Quinn and that he became a different person because of what Corinth told him before she died. He didn’t go out west, he stayed with Alice in Lily Dale, and maybe he came back to see his and Violet’s son.”
“
His
and Violet’s son? You think my grandfather was Tom Quinn’s son?”
“Well,” I say, “that’s how I wrote it.” I finished the scene a few days ago, describing Violet Ramsdale’s last days in Dr. Murdoch’s household, when she knew that the baby she’d borne was not the only thing growing in her womb all those months. I had been surprised at how painful it had been to write it because Mrs. Ramsdale wasn’t a particularly sympathetic character, but who wouldn’t pity a woman looking at her child’s face and knowing she wouldn’t live to see its first birthday? So I’d given Violet one last redemptive act: writing the pamphlet that exonerated Corinth Blackwell and then sending it to the Spiritualists’ Society in Lily Dale in the hope that if Corinth Blackwell and Tom Quinn had survived it would find its way into their, or their descendants’, hands someday.
“It would explain why Murdoch was so awful to the child,” I say, “if he knew it wasn’t his. And it might explain why your grandfather was such a miserable man.”
“You realize that means we’re related,” Nat says, sliding his eyes toward me.
“Distantly. We’re like half cousins twice removed or something. Would that bother you?”
“Not at all. I’m just thinking about our kids . . .”
“
Kids
?” I repeat, but we’ve reached the overlook and Nat is already out of the car and heading toward the cliff. The path that was knee-high in snow last winter is now carpeted in gold pine needles. The view was obscured by fog then, but now I can see the Great Sacandaga Lake, swollen wider and deeper than the original river, covering the old valley. The sun is sinking behind a line of mountains to the west, painting a wavy gold path that springs from a cleft in the mountains and snakes across the lake like the ghost of the old river. For an instant I see the valley as it was before it was flooded and hear the river rushing over the rocks below me. I reach into my pocket and pull out the white kid glove that was in my mother’s package.
I found this in one of your great-grandmother’s old trunks,
Mira had written.
Take a look at the initials sewn on the hem.
I brush my fingers along the delicate stitching.
CB.
Of course it could be anyone, but when I look down over the cliff I see, instead of the dark water of the reservoir, a beach of smooth white stones. A girl is kneeling on the beach making a pyramid out of the stones; a tall man is standing with his back to the cliff. A woman kneels by the girl as together they place a round white stone on top of the pile. The woman’s hair falls forward and merges with the girl’s hair, both flashing red in the last rays of the setting sun. I blink against the glare, and when I open my eyes the white rocks have disappeared under the dark water and the only flash of red comes from a red-winged blackbird skimming the smooth surface, flying west.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
C
AROL
G
OODMAN
is the author of
The Lake of Dead Languages, The Seduction of Water,
and
The Drowning Tree. The Seduction of Water
won the 2003 Hammett Prize, and her other novels have been nominated for the Dublin/IMPAC Award and the Simon & Schuster Mary Higgins Clark Award. Her fiction has been translated into eight languages. She teaches writing at The New School in New York City.
BY CAROL GOODMAN
The Drowning Tree
The Seduction of Water
The Lake of Dead Languages
The Ghost Orchid
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Carol Goodman
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
“Searching for the Source of Egeria’s Tears” is published by permission of
The Classical Outlook: Journal of the American Classical League
(originally published in vol. 82, no. 1, Fall 2004, p. 22) and Lee Slonimsky.
“The Eloquence of Water” and “Tunnel Walk, Spring Above” are published by permission of SRLR Press, Austin, Texas, James Michael Robbins, editor (originally published in
Money and Light
by Lee Slonimsky), and Lee Slonimsky.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Goodman, Carol.
The ghost orchid : a novel / Carol Goodman.
p. cm.
eISBN 0-345-49090-8
1. Biographers—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3607.O566G48 2006
813′.6—dc22 2005048238
v1.0